Nurse Catheter: “Hey ERP, I can’t clear the guy’s foley in room 3, can you help me?”
Me: “Don’t worry Nurse Catheter, I will show you how to irrigate a foley properly.” (as I start to squirt sterile water in with a 60 cc Toomey Syringe)
Nurse Splatter : “I don’t know, be careful. Are you sure […]

Why in the world would an apparently “normal” person (and I mean someone who did not appear like either a homeless person, dishevelled alcoholic, bizarre psych patient, or obvious chronically ill and or mentally retarded) just announce to his nurse that he needed to go to the bathroom and then promptly urinate in his pants? […]

I know you are embarrassed to tell me in front of your wife (so maybe she should leave the room), but really. I know that your penile bruising was from some sort of “trauma” and did not just spontaneously occur. You are not on coumadin and have no coagulation problems, and no bruising elsewhere, so […]

I am just not going to call the Ultrasound tech in at 4am to do a sonogram on your testicles. I know they are bothering you - but since you waited 4 MONTHS with this to come into the ED, waiting an extra 4 hours is not that big a deal I think. […]

Be careful out there - for instance, don’t sit on an antennae. Actually, I am being too harsh. This was a little boy of 2 year old who was playing and somehow sat on a telephone (base station) that had an antennae sticking up.
Yeowch - scrotal laceration. Could have been worse though - […]

The other day I had a male patient who “cooked his proverbial “goose” so to speak. No, he did not die but many men might think that something like what happened to him was almost as distressing as dying!
He worked as a chef at a restaurant and was transferring a giant pot of boiling […]

So, a case from last week had me in such a smirk, I could almost not avoid bursting out laughing while reading the triage note. The chief complaint was “dysuria” which is pretty boring. However, the rest of the note by the triage RN provided a higher level of detail that just had to be […]