Ow!

Just as we were arriving at a back pain, a cardiac arrest came in at the high school. They sent an ambulance from the city to that one, which was too bad because we heard later the teacher -- a substitute -- didn't make it. We were only a couple minutes away. Who knows if it would have made a difference? It was just bad timing.

The lady with back pain was a major pain herself. She yelled at the police officer for tracking a leaf onto her carpet. We couldn't do anything right. She had an alarm system and wouldn't tell the police officer how to set it. She insisted on doing it herself. She wouldn't tell her best friend either. It took us 40 minutes to get her out of bed and onto a stair chair, then we had to go through getting her off it, so she could set her alarm. She would say "Ow!" whenever we hit a bump. "Ow!" it seems to me is a sound that requires a mental decision to make as opposed to a true sound of pain. Anyway, I wanted to give her some morphine, but she said it made her sick. On the way to the hospital, she got upset about the direction we were going. We took the highway instead of going through the city which would have been far worse with all the rotten roads. We hit one bump on the highway and she said "I have news for you, this is the bumpier way." Not.

She liked me because I took care of her husband when he was alive. She said to me, "I know I'm such a bear." I felt like saying, "If you know your behavior is so bad, you need to correct it."

She had a mastectomy so she couldn't have a BP done in her left arm. She told it to me, she told it to the triage nurse, who wrote it down. We went to the room, and as I was giving my report to the nurse, she got out the automatic blood pressure cuff and took the woman's left arm, the woman said, "You haven't done your job, you haven't read what your supposed to. I can't have a blood pressure done on my left arm. What if I were unconsious?" She made the nurse make a sign, saying No BP or shots in the left arm.

***

We took in an old woman who refused to take her medicine because an aide was "forcing" it on her. Her presure was on the high side nd she had some increased water retention and some dementia. We were able to persuade her to go to the hospital with us.

Later we did a syncopal, who we couldn't get to go.