12. A Colossal Waste Of Everyone’s Time
“EMT here. The one that sticks out is the most textbook example of drug seeking behavior.
Get called out to a residence at 2 am (because of course, it’s always 2 am). Guy says he’s having 10/10 finger pain and gingerly holding his hand in the air. Says there was no trauma, just started suddenly and it’s unbearable.
So we load him up, take him the 25 minutes the the hospital. Entire time he’s holding his hand in the air. But we had a full conversation, talked about Football, never once did he complain about pain.
We wheel him into the ER and literally the second we walk through the door, this guy starts writhing in pain. Says he can’t sit still the pain is unbearable, he has to stand up, screaming at the nurse to help. Then he turned to the nurse and said:
‘I had this same issue at a different hospital 2 weeks ago. They couldn’t tell what was wrong. They gave me morphine but that didn’t work so then they gave me dilaudid. That worked. So maybe you should just start with dilaudid tonight.’ And then he went back to moaning in pain.
Nurse and I just looked at each other, we put him in a bed and I drove the 35 minutes back to station. Highly doubt he was given any pain less that night, was just a colossal waste of everyone’s time.”
