hood life.

i grew up in the hood.  not the mean streets of new york or anything, but still ghetto enough that when i say i'm from ___, people make comments.  we had the token airbrush store at the mall where you could get your tall-t "RIP" shirts made.  we had a police liaison office at school.  during lunch i would watch the hispanic girls fight each other (after taking off their giant hoop earrings first, of course) and little balls of yanked-out weave would roll around in the halls.  after school we had a paddy wagon that would pull into the school bus circle and people who were trying to start something would get thrown into the back.  maybe that's not normal...to me it is.  i'm not saying that i was ever a gansta myself, but that kind of life is pretty familiar to me.  i think that's part of the reason why i took to the trauma unit right away.  it feels like home, in all of its dysfunctional glory.  the ghetto made me (or at least that's the joke), and it's what i know.   and this week at work was par for the course.  

one day i was urgently called out of the nurse's station by a family member who said a patient (not mine) needed help (not true) and her call light wasn't working (also not true).  when i got to the room the multiple grilled/weaved/false-eyelashed visitors argued for awhile if i could even help them or if they needed a doctor (good luck with that one).  after i encouraged them to go ahead and try me, they asked me if "yo blood in yo body be blue".  this is apparently why i went to nursing school.

a few days later i got this patient who was in for his second evading the police car accident.  turns out someone has 5 kids (in his mid-20s) and hasn't been paying his child support.  apparently this guy has also been shot a couple times...so classy.  the "trust no bitch" and "only god can judge me" tattoos were a nice ironic touch.

for better or worse, these are my people.  and now that trauma season is drawing to a close, these are the people that i'll miss for the next 6 months where all i see is slid-on-the-ice MVCs and old people falls.  until the summer, my friends from the hood...i'll be waiting for you. 

taking pills

this week's important lesson: don't buy random unmarked pills from people in bars.  

so i get this patient out of the ICU s/p MVC with multiple rib fractures.  the guy is 70 years old and was driving his car when he suddenly lost control of the vehicle/passed out/basically has no idea what happened.  

fortunately, this is why social work notes were created.

turns out that grandpa likes some percocet for his arthritis (don't even get me started on primaries overprescribing pain meds), and ran out.  so he did what most people would do (NOT) and bought a bunch of pills off "some guy" in a bar.  

so after the crashing is done and the patient is in the ED, the unmarked bottle of pills comes out.  pharmacy looks them up and turns out that grandpa got himself 4mg Dilaudid tabs.  WHY DO 4MG DILAUDID TABS EVEN EXIST??  to be abused, that's why.  

he ended up taking "some" (aka ODing on narcs) and then getting behind the wheel.  

on the plus side, he probably didn't feel a thing when he slammed himself into a tree.  

on the minus side, he now has 10 broken ribs and his dilaudid was confiscated.  

on the plus plus side, he now gets to take oxycodone AND oxycontin. 

STOP BUYING PILLS OFF STRANGERS IN BARS.  

that will be all for today.