toastyfrog.net

The elderly black woman’s blood pressure had been dangerously elevated. While I was checking her vitals for one of many times that shift, she looked up at me hesitantly. “If I tell you something, will you do it for me?” she asked. “What is it?” I replied. “Go out yonder,” she said, pointing at the [...]

An ambulance technician in Scotland, in his post Fat Chance, has finally (and beautifully) put into words some of the frustration I’ve felt so many times when working with obese patients: Morbid obesity is dangerous, hence the moniker, but in the emergency situation it’s not the ischaemic heart disease that causes the problems, nor the [...]

There are cameras in the patient rooms on our psych units. The images they produce are tiny, black and white, and grainy. (That’s not really by design; they’re just very old, and they aren’t broken, so there’s no reason to replace them.) They don’t show much detail — just enough to allow us to keep [...]

We were getting a new patient on the psych unit. This person had been picked up by the police with no ID, psychotic and mute. We were informed we couldn’t admit them as J___ Doe, which was the name the police had given them, because that would reveal their gender, thereby violating their privacy. The [...]