At this point, I tell the patient, ‘I’m going to be writing up paperwork for this call and your treatment. Part of what is going to be written up is the fact that you said you slipped on a wet floor, and that no water was found either on the floor or soaked into your clothing. This is standard; I have to write up what I’m told in addition to what I see. What you need to understand is this – if you happen to decide to take Wal-Mart to court, they can request a copy of my run report, and it’s going to show what you said and what I found. They can also summon me to testify, and if they do, I’m going to tell them what you told me and what I saw, the manager saw, and what your friends saw. That being said, do you want to keep dragging this out and go to the hospital, or do you want to just get up from my stretcher and be done with it?’
She chose to get up and leave.
Story #3 – We get called to a 13 year old having a first-time seizure. We get on scene, and the entire family is freaking out, except for the father. I walk into the room where the kid was – OBVIOUS FAKER. I turn to dad and have him go outside into the hallway, I tell him the boy is faking, and I ask if anything unusual happened today. The father tells me he found marijuana in the kid’s room, and he was getting on to him about it when the kid started ‘seizing.’ I reassured the father that his son was NOT seizing, and he asked if we could take him to the hospital ‘just to be safe.’ I said no problem. We pick the kid up and put him on the stretcher, and as we head outside to the ambulance, he exhibits more behavior that shows he’s faking.
Inside the ambulance, I tell the kid that I know he’s faking and ask him to stop, but he keeps on. The hospital we take him to doesn’t have board-certified Emergency Department physicians; they use General Practice and Internal Medicine physicians (a LOT of smaller hospitals do this). I bring the kid in and give a patient report to the internal medicine doc and the RN, and I say the kid is ‘faking his seizure activity.’ The doctor had a problem with that – ‘You can’t possibly tell that he’s faking.’ I assure him that, yes, the kid is faking. I explain the situation that led up to him faking, and that I could prove it. The doctor says, ‘I’d like to see that.’
The RN knows EXACTLY what’s going on and what I wanted to do; he’s all for it! So I say to the kid, ‘Bob (I don’t remember his name), we need a urine sample from you, and we need you to wake up to do it. If you don’t wake up, we’re going to shove a tube into your penis, run it all the way into your bladder, and take a urine sample from you. Please, just wake up and give us a sample.’
Nothing from the kid.
‘Okay, Bob, if you don’t wake up in 10 seconds, we’re going to start prepping you to get the tube shoved into your penis. Ten, nine, eight, FIVEFOURTHREETWOONE!’
His eyes opened wide as saucers before he realized we caught him. He then closed his eyes, started blinking, looked around the room, and said, ‘What happened?’ The RN was laughing, and the doc was a little pissed.”
