Just Another Day at the Office

I am sick. That is not meant as a judgement of myself, rather it is an actual physical description. My office mate told me that I sound like Brenda Vaccaro. I'm not sure who she is, but if she sounds like she's been a smoker for the past 60 years, then I sound like her. I have not been able to breathe out of either nostril in days and I bark like a seal when I cough. The reason I had been feeling like I couldn't breathe is because my body was getting ready to mount this assault on me with this horrific cold. Basically, I'm miserable and I want the whole world to know. I laid in bed for almost 3 entire days. The good news is that I finally got to watch "The Millionairre Matchmaker" on Bravo.

Despite my fragile state, ever the martyr, I went in to work today. The first part of the day was spent lying on a nogahide couch in the resident's lounge in the back of the ER. Every time the residents or students had a patient to discuss they would tiptoe back to where I was napping and gently rouse me out of my misery. They could have ordered an open-heart biopsy to be performed right there in the ER (just like they do everything in the ER on the show ER) and I would have agreed to it. After lunch I decided that I had better make an appearance and actually see a few patients. This was a critical error in judgment.

Mostly, I really like the ER. It is a fun, strange, surreal, crazy, hectic, humbling place to practice medicine. Occassionally you have to deal with the scourge of the earth and you want them to crawl back under the rock from whence they came. Today was one of those days. Maybe it was because I felt so shitty. Regardless, after my interaction with one of the patients I found myself wondering why I hadn't bothered calling in sick today. The man wanted cough syrup; prescription cough syrup. Well, no one gets a prescription for cough syrup with codeine from the ER. It just doesn't happen. Besides, I didn't hear him cough one time the entire 15 minutes I spent interviewing and examining him. His lungs were crystal clear and he was finishing a course of antibiotics his primary care doctor had prescribed for him. When I told him that I could give him a prescription strength cough drop, otherwise he'd have to buy over the counter cough syrup, he went ape-shit on me. He pulled out the race card. I had not seen this coming. He told me that I wasn't giving him prescription cough syrup because he was black and all white doctors thought that black patients "just wanted the syrup and they were all drug heads!"

His tactic backfired. It was all intimidation. He thought he could intimidate me into prescribing him narcotics by calling me a racist. This was not the most well thought out plan. After my initial desire to tell him to shut the f-ck up while biting my tongue so as not to call him a f---ing, sh-thead, a--hole and curbing my urge to spit in his face, I took a deep breath (through my mouth b/c, unlike my patient, I actually could not breathe out of my nose) and told him (with the utmost professionalism, of course) that he could not speak to me in that manner and if he continued to speak to me in the tone that he was using (by the way, when he told me I was racist, he was yelling at me and in my face) that I would be happy to call security to escort him out of the hospital. He didn't like this plan so he decided that he would leave on his own. Right then and there. I didn't go running after him, I'm not that much of a martyr, but I did offer, one last time, to give him the cough drops that he didn't want. He declined, though not politely.

I was hopping mad after that little interaction. I was like Deputy Dawg mumbling all sorts of things under my breath, "Sassen frassen...Scourge of the earth...syrup!...hah!...sassen frassen..." It took about 2 to 3 more patients for me to completely pipe down, but by the time the HIV positive lady asked me to look at her "27 vaginal warts", I was as cool as a cucumber. I guess it's just all in a day's work...