Tooth Hurts

I arrive at work this afternoon to learn I’ll be caring for Sheila, who has become a bit of a regular in recent times. She’s in her 70’s, has a sprinkle of dementia, a head bleed which can truly no longer be classified as “acute”, and a touch of alcoholism. I introduce myself to her (for about the third time this week) and go meet my other patients. I walk back to room 15 (I’ve been gone for roughly 120 seconds) to find Sheila eating chocolate pudding with a plastic knife because YOLO. Inevitably, the only way I’m able to wrestle the knife out of Sheila’s hand (as she continually threatens to stab me) is to promise her a Jack and Coke. So I hand her a cup of soda with ice and she says “thanks, cheers!”. She drinks all of it and then promptly passes out in her chair. She wakes up 20 minutes later and stands abruptly, announces that she is “lost in the sauce” and proceeds to urinate all over my shoes. She has now convinced herself that she’s drunk. She sits back down, looks at me and says “you make a stiff drink, bar-keep!” and then subsequently plops back down in her chair with the apparent intentions to “sleep this one off”. I proceed to spend the final 11.5 hours of my shift mediating a verbal brawl between a prostitute admitted for a head injury after being beaten up by her pimp and an elderly lady who had driven her car drunk and crashed into a stop sign because she was on her way to “warn the police about the impending spread of ‘V2k’ which is a ‘microwave weapon’ controlled by ‘target groups’ run by Hitler and Obama”. The hooker is tethered to a chair with wrist restraints (all of which makes her constant gyrating seem even more like a career-choice) and periodically calls out to various staff members to “untie me so I can go see ‘daddy’ and get some crack”. The elderly lady is wearing soft-mitt restraints, making her look like the world’s oldest bantamweight fighter, and soliciting any and all passerby to call the police because she is allegedly being held against her will. She eventually tires of harassing bystanders and shadow-boxing, but only after her wig falls off. Meanwhile, room 17 is ringing her call bell incessantly. I answer it, only to be informed that she needs a new sheet on her bed. She dislikes her current one because “it’s weird”. She’s pacified solely with chocolate ice cream and Trazodone. My last two patients are in rooms 13 and 16, one of whom is a middle-aged man completely oriented to his surroundings, yet whom insists on wearing a condom catheter and requests that I take his current one off and put a new one on so he can “see my technique”. The other is a 22-year old kid who crashed his car while driving drunk and upon being offered pain medications, launches into a tirade regarding the declining street value of the Percocet I’ve offered him in comparison with a plethora of other narcotics. He rambles on about opiate appraisal with the normalcy of two coworkers discussing mutual fund investments in a 401k. I stifle the urge to roll my eyes as I walk away; evidently Oxycodone is the Vanguard 500 of the inner-city crowd. I end my night by answering a final call bell, triggered again by the “weird sheet” lady. I walk in to see her sitting up in bed and holding what appears to be her tooth in her hand. She informs me, “it just fell out”. I look at her completely flabbergasted, throw my hands in the air and say in exasperation “I literally don’t even know who to call about this” and walk out of the room, past the newly-trained dental resident, past the pamphlet on “meth and dental retention” and out across the parking lot to the nearby bar to reconsider all of the life decisions which have led me here.