Bitter Days

Suffered through a serious case of dysphoria mid-shift today.  After the 3rd evening holiday shift in a row, I have a short fuse.

Had a sketchy lady come in for back pain.  I looked her up in the database before I even went to see her, and found out that she was a drug shopper.  Percocet and Vicodin from all kinds of different sources.  But she was smart, I gave her an opportunity to tell the truth, and she caught on quick.  Fessed up, and didn't piss me off as much as I thought she would.
Had a young, upbeat, polite lady come in for back pain with her man friend.  She told me she hadn't taken anything for pain.  In fact, she ran out of ibuprofen.  The nurse had a hunch that something wasn't right about her, so I looked her up too.  Another narc shopper.  But this girl was stupid beyond just regular stupid.  I gave her multiple opportunities to to tell it to me straight, and she just kept on lying.  I finally laid it out for her after about 15 minutes of her changing her story and lying about whether she had narcs already.  I knew about her previous Perc prescriptions the whole time she was trying to sell me a used lemon.

My next patient was a Meth user who missed the vein and had a nasty bruise on her leg. The nurse told me she wanted help getting clean.  I went to go talk to her and she was mess.  Track marks and bruises everywhere.  Today wasn't the first time she missed the vein.  As it turned out, she had no interest in detox.  After I walked out of the room in disgust, the nurse told me that Child Protective Services had been called to check on the lady's three kids.  It turned out that they couldn't follow through because she had given a false address.  At the same time, the man friend of drug seeker #2 was asking for my full name, presumably to give to the lawyer they had hired to sue the doctor who took care of her mother who had a stroke.  I was pretty close to the end of my rope.  Funny how people think ER is stressful.  It is, in fact, stressful, but not for any of the reasons they think. Stress is this other crap that makes me want to go postal.

Well, at least I have pretty t-shirts.  Speaking of shirts, we are working with Steve Mabry of Mountain Flyer to do organic shirts and hats.  Mountain Flyer is the bike porn of bike magazines.  Not dirty, butthole porn, but really classy porn.  In trade, I am going to have some ad space in future editions of Mountain Flyer.   This is the ad for the next edition. Hope to have some hot photos in subsequent ads.

Tim Grayson, formerly of Zeut, tells me that it looks good for using some Zeut music in the bike-mower music video. More on that later.

One more shift tonight.  It's Memorial Day, and the Bolder Boulder is bringing another 40,000 folks into the area. If I can manage to avoid strangling any dirtbags tonight, it will be a successful evening.  That's a warning to all potential A-holes out there.  No more Yankie my Wankie!

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