April 23, 2024

I work in an Emergency Department, and have noticed that there is one common denominator in the majority of the assaulted patients I treat: they were all assaulted by “Some Dude“. (Also, they were all assaulted for “…no reason…”, but that’s the topic of another rant). This is true no matter where I work, the time of day or day of the week.

“Some Dude” has in the last two weeks shot my patients, sucker-punched, struck with bottles, beaten them with fists and a golf club (or perhaps the entire set), and pushed my patients down stairs.

Additionally, “Some Dude” has ‘slipped drugs’ into the drinks of, transmitted sexual diseases to, and stolen the medications of my patients.

I have no idea how “Some Dude” is everywhere at once. I suspect he’s an evil superhero, though in the current times I cannot completely exclude an AlQuaeda conspiracy.

I advocate a vigorous police and public-health effort to locate and confine “Some Dude” due to the clear and present danger he represents to the health and welfare of our republic.

18 thoughts on ““Some Dude”: Public Health Menace

  1. Sounds familiar.
    My own experience leads me to believe that if people stopped “minding their own business” then assaults would drop precipitously.
    I swear; every assault case comes in and starts their story by saying “I was just minding my own business, when (>1) (huge or big) (guys or dudes) came up to me and started to (beat/kick/punch) me for no reason.”
    So, if you want to avoid a fight against multiple large assailants, then stop minding your own business.

  2. Apparently we have more “dudes” here in Georgia. The stories always involve “two dudes” and the patients have only had “two beers”.

  3. The phrase I always get is “I just went out to get some cigarettes.”

    The bast example was a male who was shot in the scrotum; he’s on the table for an emergency angio and when asked what happened he said ” I just went out for a pack of cigarettes…”

    We wonderered if he was accosted by a revolver-weilding achondroplast…

  4. It?s obvious that you well-educated and knowledgeable gentlemen never spent any time as a criminal investigator.

    Actually the phrase ?dude? has been incorporated into a very well known legal defense used during criminal interrogations as well as in criminal trials by both defense attorneys and defendants alike and is referred to as the ?SODDI Defense.?

    To be relevant in the trial the defendant must have invoked it during his/her interrogations.

    When asked what happens the defendant must reply:, ?I don?t know what happened, Some Other Dude Did It.?

    It?s been my experience that it doesn?t work very well despite being the defense tactic that seems to be the one most often employed.

  5. Hi friend!

    I have no idea how “Some Dude” is everywhere at once. I suspect he’s an evil superhero, though in the current times I cannot completely exclude an AlQuaeda conspiracy.

    “I have no idea how “Some Dude” is everywhere at once.”

    Simple. He’s the unacknowledged offspring of the Tooth Fairy & Santa Claus.

    Some Dude is a gamer, no…he’s a musician..….and Just Some Dude has left a pink iPod as a placeholder. It might be me, but that might be a violation of duditude. Just Some Dude is sometimes impersonated by an actor called Clifton Collins jr., who used to be somebody else like Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez. It’s confusing. No wonder people are always getting hassled by some dude. Some Dude makes Fry Sauce, which is better and more interesting than the Utah ketchup and mayonnaise mix (note to self: skip the “Utah Gourmet” tour) Senor Dude has a bike accident in Columbia.

    I freely acknowledge that my current position, far from ERs and public safety venues, allows me a much rosier (and delusional) view of the state of human intelligence than some of your readers….

  6. A man was brought into the ER for a gunshot to the hip, and was being interviewed by the police officer. He asked the patient what he was doing behind the apartment building where the incident occured. With some reluctance, the patient said

    “Someone told me somebody was back there.”

    The cop asked him who told him to go back there.

    “I don’t know.”

    And who did he find behind the apartment?

    “The guy that shot me!” And that’s all he would say to the cop after that.

  7. No, you’ve all got it wrong. Some dude is not one person. The “Some Dudes” is a gang (like the Crips and the Bloods). Their color is black (as opposed to blue or red) and their gang initiation is to attack someone who is minding their own business, walking the dog, or going to get cigarettes.

  8. Doc Russia:

    “I swear; every assault case comes in and starts their story by saying “I was just minding my own business, when (>1) (huge or big) (guys or dudes) came up to me and started to (beat/kick/punch) me for no reason.””

    I will have to say that, in my case, the some dude reference holds completely true. Back in 1969 in Schenectady, NY, in the one time I have been physically assaulted on the street, my two friends and I, all of us under 18, were walking past a grocery store quietly minding my our business. Some men in their 20s came out of a bar across the street, and upon seeing us, began to beat us about the face and torso. One of my friends was thrown through the plate glass window of the grocery store while I proceeded to defend myself with a can of pepper spray.

    It finally ended when some friends driving past saw us in trouble and stopped to help. I never knew what the fuss was about or who the attackers were. Just ended up with a swollen nose and a pair of broken glasses.

    One could certainly say that Some Dude does get around. One could also say that reports of unprovoked attacks should not be so summarily discounted.

    Brahim

  9. When I was at VMC (now UMC, just a “few” years before you) we had basically two types of patients, the Does and the Dudes. The administration for a time didn’t like using “Doe” and we went to a system where every new Doe got a greek lastname and a roman numeral first name. It was ridiculous, I have XVII Omicron with a GSW to the head and III Mu in DKA…that was my intern year. The administration also thought that all the house staff should be color coded by specialty. I was still IM, we got navy blue (called smirfs for obvious reasons) and EM was beige I believe. Knowing house staff at a county hospital, what the administration wanted lasted no more than a week–and everyone changed scrubs. They even put labels on the scrub tops–made them look like “Mr. Goodwrench”–in fact the joke was, “hi, I’m Dr. Goodfinger.” When I was EM, all the scurbs were across the spectrum of colors.

    Some dude always consumed the universal intoxicating dose of “dos cervezas” was arrested “for no reason” for doing “nothing” lives “somewhere” …

  10. We have ‘those two dudes’ here in the Detroit-Metro area, too! They were also in Vegas when I worked at UMC, and Cleveland when I worked at Metro! I agree with the commenter who said they must be super-heroes, they would have to be to get around like this.

    Do y’all get the gsw’s that tell triage they are there for the ‘flu’ and you don’t find out about the gsw until you are doing the exam, and they have absolutely NO IDEA how it could possibly happened or who might have done such a thing?

    When the cops show up, it always turns out it ‘may have been these two dudes . . . ‘

    Diana, The Write Wing

  11. Don’t forget about Some Dude’s brother This Dude. The county hospital ER where I trained talked about the “Dude Brothers” causing the sort of problems you are describing. As in, “yeah, I was minding my own business when Some Dude did… and then This Dude did…” etc.

  12. Hey Dudes, this is pretty funny, especially the one about going to the ER for the flu and not telling them about a GSW…That same type thing happens when you get a patient that comes in for a BAD cough and what they actually have is lung cancer, that is being treated by an oncologist but they neglect to tell you that until you begin to pry a history out of them.

  13. I don’t remember who convinced me to go to medical school but it was “some dude”. He also made me pick medicine as a residency.

    Taht “some dude” fucks people on both sides of the ambulance ride.

  14. And isn’t it amazing how some of our patients who have been assaulted by “some dude” as they were “just minding their own business” always results in “losing their bottle of Percocet or Oxycontin” that they had just filled at the pharmacy.

  15. In Mississippi, when I was in training in the 1970’s, “some dude” was so frequent that his name was spelled as “Som Dood”. Under the personal physician slot on the ER form we had “Dr. No name” so often that it was change to the east indian form “Dr. Noname”

    Art

  16. At Charity Hospital New Orleans, in the ’70s, the most common offering from a stabbing victim was “I got juged (pronounced JEW-guhd) by a dude”. The term lost it’s currency once I got out west to Los Angeles ERs but “dude” abides. Anybody know the etymology of “juged” (sp?) ?
    The other common denominator of such victims was the fact they “were trying to break up a fight.”
    Samaritans were everywhere.
    A New Orleans cop said it all : today’s victim is tomorrow’s perpetrator.

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