Quacking Off

I had barely clocked in for my last shift of 2019 when I hear the call overhead, “Trauma Alert, room 4, patient is here”. I grab my stuff and head over to my assignment where I’m greeted by my first patient of the day, a 19-year old who is sitting straight up in a wheelchair, drinking McDonald’s sweet tea while medical personnel flood his room and start prodding him. I recognize him from the last time he was here, when he had been shot in the leg and had to be transferred to the operating room for emergent surgery. Evidently he had been shot again, this time in the shoulder. Upon further questioning, he reveals that he stopped at the McDonald’s drive-thru on his way to the hospital because we “never let anyone eat when they come here”. I stare blankly at the patient, imagining the look on the drive-thru worker’s face when they saw him bleeding profusely in his car, and turn to the surgical resident who rolls his eyes and says “the anesthesiologist is going to love the fact that his surgical patient just took down a quarter pounder and large fries”. The patient shrugs and tosses his sweet tea into the nearby trash can, burps loudly, and declares that he is tired and will now be taking a nap. Based on the amount of blood loss (and carbo-loading), his acute fatigue is justified and we rush him up to the operating room to attempt to salvage his driving arm for future McDonald’s runs. Onto my next patient, a fantastically intoxicated gentleman in his late 50’s who is making loud (albeit accurate) duck noises in his stretcher which he periodically interrupts to proclaim “I’m quacking off!” I introduce myself to him and he immediately responds by yelling “your socks are untied!” I promptly exit the room to let him sleep it off (or quack it off). My next patient is a woman in her late 40’s with what can only be described as “crazy eyes”. Her chief complaint is “a snake is following me. The doctor sent me in for a “T scan”. Upon further questioning, she reveals that she was at Nordstrom’s when a snake fell from the sky and bit her on the head so she moved to another store and wouldn’t you know it, the same snake tried to bite her again so she called her doctor who said she should come to the Emergency Department. She admits that she is unsure what a “T scan” is but she insists that it will allow her to throw the snake off the trail. I halfheartedly nod my head in agreement while stealthily calling the psychiatric crisis team to come pick her up. My next patient is a young woman in her early 20’s who had evidently written a Millennial-style, overly-dramatic “so long cruel world” Facebook post, popped a handful of Klonopin, and then proceeded to eat fried chicken until the medics arrived and dumped her unceremoniously into room 3, where she explained to me that she had found the chicken in the backseat of a van. I told her I needed to get rid of it and she replied, “but it’s my last meal”. I rolled my eyes, explicitly aware that she would make a full recovery and probably start some sort of “hashtag Klonopin and chicken” movement on Instagram, gain 10,000 followers, and become a social media “influencer” by next week. I left the room to go meet my fifth and final patient, a gentleman in his late 60’s who had checked in for “wounds from diabetes” which turned out to be a bit of an understatement. The man had fallen asleep multiple times over the past few months while holding lit cigarettes and had evidently burned off about two to three quarters of each finger on his right hand. When my shift began, he was already admitted to the floor for observation and IV antibiotics. I walked into his room and introduced myself but he was in a panic. Evidently he was requesting to sign out against medical advice because he wanted to go home and charge his jazzy scooter. With no fight left in me, I relented and went to find the AMA paperwork and some educational pamphlets on smoking cessation before he burned his entire neighborhood down. I handed him the information and he hobbled out the front door. I wished him good luck, and as he waved back at me with roughly 3.7 fingers, I thought “2020 can’t possibly be any weirder than this”.