ED Themes and my latest drama

Worked 12 hours yesterday. Another high day in the counts: my guess it was over the whopping 148 we had last Friday.

It is snowbird season, if you are not from Florida. This means the elusive (well, not so much) snowbird with silver white plumes and a lifetime mate makes their way in RV's (vehicle of choice) to Central FL to spend the winter. Snowbirds do not like cold, and they don't like shoveling the snow. (Well, that sound like me.)

To review, "Theme for the day" are monikers bestowed upon the ED after, say, a few hours have passed. I kinda like "baby days", but last week we had "poopy day." Code brown is a great reason for a tech to run in the other direction and not look back. So, yesterday's theme was threefold: "New patient to the hospital day" (where a tech gets to type in more than a few items to register a patient), "same name day" (even patients unrelated with the same last name were coming in! *JHACO* check those armbands! And, lastly, "acute patient with no room at the inn" day....which means we were so busy, there was no room for patients that normally would be back soon. Mind you, we a re small hospital: our major care section includes 14 beds, and Minor Care is 5 beds. But, this is the procedure of how we fill up:

1. Person gets sick.

2. Person Calls PCP: "All full, everyone is sick, come back another time,please"

3. Person goes to walk in clinic: "All full, everyone sick, etc."

4. Person ends up at hospital ED

5. All hospitals' EDs are full all day

6. Some creative pts call ambulance. Ambulance lands them into waiting room also.

7. Long long waits

=angry, tired,impatient,sick people in waiting room

Thank god I was only in Triage for 4 hours in the morning. Got to fix boo boos in Minor Care later in the day. I will probably not be so lucky today, though. We shall see....

You Know It's a Full Moon when....

...or almost-full moon.

Conversation between me and a patient checking in yesterday.

Patient registering into triage hands me the check-in sheet with the chief complaint.

Kimberly (me) reads the sheet:

K: "So. You got bit my a monkey."
P: "Yes." (nothing more said.)
K: " You are sure it was a monkey."
P: "Oh..yes."
K: (not sure where to go with this.) "Was it your monkey" (she really doesn't look like an animal trainer)
P: "No."
K: (looking at swelling on the hand) "When did this happen?"
P: (she glances at the clock and calculates) "Oh, about 7:30 this morning." (it is now 10:00am)
K: "How did this happen?"
P: "I was walking down Main Street (street name changed to protect the innocent) and there was a man with a monkey, and I went to pet it and it bit me."
K: "Do you know if the monkey is up on all his shots?"
P: "No, the man and the monkey ran away after it happened."

Morals to the story:
1. Do not pet angry monkeys
2. Remove all rings and jewelry from swelling hands ASAP
3. Call authorities if an angry monkey is on the loose. Running men with monkeys is usually not a good thing.
4. You never know what is walking on main street.
5. Anything can happen on a full moon.
6. Anything can happen in the ED.