It was a middle of the winter, slow night shift. A 90 year old woman from an outlying rural town was brought to our ED by their local ambulance service, 45 minutes away. She had called 911 because her carbon monoxide detector was going off. Paramedics and firefighters responded to her home only to find that the noise was coming from an alarm clock that she had forgotten about in a spare bedroom.
Paramedics checked her over and found her blood pressure to be high. They brought her 45 minutes to the hospital. By the time she arrived it was 6am and it was time for her morning blood pressure pill. We gave her her 6am medications (which she had brought with her) and in 30 minutes her pressure was normal again. We notified her hometown ambulance service (which was now 30 minutes away) and they came back to the ER and took our patient home.
It was the middle of a crazy weekend night shift in the ER in Iowa. I had just finished my residency in emergency medicine in Chicago The night was stupid busy. There were patients everywhere. Sick ones, mad ones, drunk ones blue ones. They called me into a room with a twenty-ish male patient who was accompanied by police. Evidently he had been stealing his parents stuff, pawning it and buying whatever drugs he can get his hands on. That night he had been drinking/druggin and was so sleepy he could barely keep his eyes open. When he did open his eyes he was profane to officers and nursing staff. I entered the room at the tail end of a slew of cursing… He could barely keep his eyes open and then he started cussing me too. He was obviously very intoxicated and high on illicit drugs. I said “Dude, why don’t you move to Chicago, there are a BUNCH of drug addicts THERE?”