Report

1:30 in the morning, the buzzer goes off. Call for a person at a nursing home who the nurse says is faking it and just wants to go to the hospital, but is complaining of chest pain. Great. I sleep walk out to the ambulance. We drive there without lights and sirens simply because we will get there in the same amount of time either way because no one else is on the road. The nurse meets us at the door. We wheel the stretcher in and ask which way. "Out of the way," she says, "I need to lock the door." Okay.

She leads us to the room. She seems very annoyed. On the way, she says, "I shouldn't be telling you this, but he is faking, There is nothing wrong with him, but I had to call the doctor and he said send him in."

The patient is familiar to me. I've taken him in in the past. He is a COPDer. The nurse is back with the paperwork, which she is giving to my partner. "I need that," I say. She looks at me, but then back at my partner, still trying to hand him the paperwork and talk to him. "No, you need to talk to me," I say.

"Don't talk to me like that," she says.

What? "Excuse me, you need to give me the report. What exactly is going on with the patient?"

"I'm not talking to you. He's an EMt, I can tell him."

"I'm the one who's going to be taking care of the patient, you need to give me the report."

"Well, how would I know that?"

"That's why I'm telling you, you need to talk to me."

"I'm not giving you the report."

I feel like I am in a dream. I haven't raised my voice, I haven't done anything and this nurse is yelling at me at two in the morning.

"Look, you dialed 911. You have to give a report."

The police officer has come over to intervene now.

"Let's think about the patient," he says to her. "You need to cooperate with us."

"He can read it, but I'm not talking to him."

"I can't read it," I say.

The light in the hallway is dim and the writing is not the clearest.

I finally get some semblance of a report. She says he was belligerent and threatened to kill himself because she wouldn't call an ambulance. And that he is all the time faking illness. I ask if he has psychiatric problems. He does, she says. Wht meds is he on? It should be on there, she says. I hand her the paperwork back. She looks at it. It lists nothing. She has to go get the med list for me. I talk to the patient. He refers to the nurse as a B----. He says he has chest pain, the runs and hurts all over. He says he just got out of the hospital following a three day stay for pneumonia. None of that is on the W-10. We load him on the stretcher and go.

I call for times and the dispatcher asks what did we do to the nurse. She called to complain about me in particular. I tell the dispatcher I'll write an incident report.

I do. I write about how she said the patient was faking and how he had to threaten to kill himself to get her to call for an ambulance.

She'll have to give another report to someone else.