I have relived the smell on some small level with the few infants we’ve had with grossly bloody diarrhea… It’s just the mix of blood and…well…I don’t need to be graphic. Those that have smelled it know exactly what I mean!

I think he was an engineering major in college.

doctor: “do you use any drugs?”
patient: “no”
doctor: “well, do you smoke weed?”
patient: “yes, sometimes”
doctor: “when did you last smoke meth?” (repeat the question for every drug you can think of)
patient: “two days ago”
doctor: “I thought you said you didn’t use drugs?”
patient: “I thought you meant today”

Carrie,

I think you are confusing ulcerative colitis with pseudomembranous colitis. A good case of pseudomembraneous colitis will exterminate a whole wing of the hospital.

And people wonder why I’m against drug legalization…

People really do say the wackiest things sometimes. One night while in the ER (again while I was a student), I was taking care of a patient with abdominal pain, a history of abdominal surgery, and a seriously distended, tense abdomen that didn’t look all that great… She was moaning and told me that she had taken vicodin and something else that I can’t remember. I thought this was prescribed for her because she very obviously had received some sort of medical care recently and appeared to have a good bit of pain. She said she had been prescribed it. Then later on, she grabbed my arm and told me that she had bought it on the street because she couldn’t afford the prescription. She kept telling me about the drugs she bought on the street… I’m not sure if she was saying all this because she was worried that maybe what she bought wasn’t what she thought or what exactly! Her honesty was a little surprising!

Then another one that really got me was I was taking care of an infant on the NICU one night when the baby’s mother called in to see how he was doing. The infant was being treated for neonatal abstinence syndrome and the mother had been positive (by UDS) for benzos, methadone, opiates, and crack… The mom was very obviously concerned about her infant’s condition, and the baby was not exhibiting any signs of withdrawal and we had stopped scoring him since it had been some time (he was fairly premature, so somehow skipped major withdrawal)….the mom then went on to ask me about how crack affects the baby. She actually put it as, “What about the crack?” I then picked my jaw up off the desk and asked if she had been doing it all the time during the pregnancy. She went on to say, “No…just once in awhile, you know. I just got really lucky I guess.” Oh my… (Pertinent details all changed for privacy, but she really did ask this…)

I remember all the patients in the ER brought in unresponsive (cognitively) due to drugs and alcohol. We also had a ton that were there for seizures, and many were drug related. One night (during the time when I used to work ER patient registration) a patient was brought in and labelled John Doe. His family happened to call and ask about him by name, and I said we didn’t have a patient there by that name but we did have a patient that we could not identify. The family (wife, I presume) went on to describe him and said he’d been doing all these drugs…very brutally blunt. She did positively ID her husband – and she sounded quite pissed by the whole thing. It certainly wasn’t his first visit there for this, either. Sad sometimes…