Sunday Scaries

The following comprises the shift report I passed along to one unsuspecting coworker on this fine Sunday evening… your first patient is a 20-year old girl who suffered a minor heart attack this afternoon after doing a speedball (cocaine and heroin combo) last night and who is primarily concerned with snapping selfies and finding an emoji that properly represents her “near-death experience”. Throughout our journey to ultrasound earlier, she felt obligated to post about her incident on social media, complete with a request for “thoughts and prayers”. Her number of “likes” has been exceeded only by the amount of prayer-hand emojis that have graced her most recent GoFundMe, which is titled “Erikka Needs a New Heart”. Let the record show that she does not need a heart transplant whatsoever, but Erikka with the redundant “K” could likely benefit from a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Your next patient is a large, black gentleman with dreadlocks who was brought in by ambulance 3 hours ago and is so fantastically intoxicated that he is still in the computer as “John Doe” because he has only opened his eyes once since his arrival. When asked if he was oriented to his immediate location, he answered “peanut”. At the current time, he is affectionately being referred to as “Shamu”. The only emergency contact listed on his file is someone who is hopefully going by an alias and is named “Dirty Martinez”. Upon reaching out to the alleged Mr. Martinez, the associated phone number was answered by a place called “Broadway Dry Cleaners”. Your third patient is a highly confused, elderly, albino black lady who could easily win first place in an Al Sharpton look-alike contest and who earlier rang her call bell and asked “where’s the party?” Roughly ten minutes later, she rang her call bell again and when asked what she needed, she turned somber and whispered, “how many people did I shoot?” I backed out of the room slowly with my hands visibly in the air. Clearly She-Sharpton had seen some shit in her day. Your next patient is a gentleman named Arnie, a regular who is frequently picked up on the side of the road by medics while publicly intoxicated, or when a good Samaritan spots him laying in a puddle of urine on a park bench surrounded by brown paper bags, used needles, and broken dreams. He sleeps off his bender on a hallway stretcher until he’s reached that sweet spot between “too drunk to even stumble” and “too sober to start asking for a turkey sandwich” and then gets booted back to his outdoor playground to strew drug paraphernalia around the neighborhood and serve as an incidental public service announcement for the hepatitis vaccine. Roughly 60% of the time, he is covered in bed bugs. Your final patient is another regular, a 20-something white girl who looks like she probably attends a support group for Millenials with peanut allergies and high-functioning anxiety which takes place inside of a Trader Joe’s every Taco Tuesday. She has a notorious list of previous visits, including “human bite to left arm” and “found running naked through train station”. Many more visits involve smoking PCP-laced marijuana and various assaults. Tonight she is here because she “smoked some bad weed and is having a panic attack”. She was medicated with a benzodiazepine for her anxiety and is currently sleeping on a hallway stretcher. She periodically wakes up, tosses her faux-dreadlocked hair theatrically, and makes random statements including “I need coconut water. Water is life” and “I am going to drive my car off this bridge. Please notify my baby daddy. Goodbye, cruel world”, before passing back out in a drug-induced stupor. When questioned regarding her past medical history, she adamantly proclaimed that her mother had died from prostate cancer. Upon further investigation, it was revealed that her mother is very much alive, does not have a prostate, and would like for us to please give her a call immediately when her daughter wakes up so she can come rescue her yet again from her poor decisions in true hyper-involved, Millenial helicopter-parent fashion. I wish I was making any of this up but unfortunately this was literally the cast of characters with whom I spent my Sunday evening, given new meaning to the term “Sunday Scaries”.