Can I get a translator, please?!
So most of the patients that end up over at Dr. C's ortho office are...how do I put it nicely....ummm, ridiculously stupid. But this one guy in particular had Dr. C. and I laughing hilariously. So, first of all, picture a 65yo trucker whose been smoking and drinking since birth, and also seems to have been baking in an oven known as Phoenix for all these years....and then make him twice as crusty as you're thinking. There, that's just about right. I really think I could've reached up and snapped AK's off his face like barnacles. Now, as far as his voice, try to imagine how Billy Bob Thornton's character from Sling Blade (kind of looked like him too) might sound if he were drowning in his own phlegm, and had the inability to clear his throat. Are you with me? So, needless to say, I understood approx every 3rd word while interviewing him, and so after about 5 uncomfortable minutes of pretending to know what he was saying, I grabbed Dr. C. to come in the room. Dr. C seemed to understand even less. So, we struggled through the exam, and it was almost over after I injected his shoulder with some cortisone/local. Then the pt grabbed the 2 canes that he walked in with, prompting the question, "why do you use 2 canes?" And this was the guy's response: "Well, I lost the use of my legs when I was 49. Freak of nature they told me. My legs stopped growin', and the bone took off through my back until it cut off the spinal fluid to my legs. Got so bad that it laminated the vein. But I'm doin' pretty good with these 2 canes of mine." This is an exact quote mind you, and if you can make any since of it, I'd love to hear it. Dr C. and I just gave each other a look and a laugh, and then he says to the pt. "Okay, well we will see you in a month to look at that shoulder," as if that last comment had never even happened. Hilarious! Oh, and of course....AWKWARD! And by the way, Kat- I guess that clears up where Shauntoi's laminator went.
4 comments:
Any post that includes "barnacles" automatically earns 4 "I tell you about that one!"s. You only need five to get the highest rating, an unprecedented 5 ITYATOs.
At least three things about this post are hilarious: 1) Dr. C just went on talking as if he hadn't even heard what the patient said ("just pretend you didn't hear him" is sometimes great advice with these patients), 2) the imagination that this pt has in creating such a colorful explanation for his current symptoms (that's better than just saying, I'm not sure what happened, I just can't walk, like one of my patients says) and 3) Brent's memory must be pretty keen to remember such details, but then again, how could you forget such a wild story?
This guy may have a little bit of psychosis ("Do ya think?") His story reminds me of a schizo pt I had on psych as a 3rd year med student. She was in an acute psychotic state and was wandering the hotels of Phoenix. She was brought in by the police and I did the intial admit questioning. She was supposedly on a special FBI task force in Phoenix to get all of the prostitutes and drug dealers out of the hotels and she had been surveilling them for the past few weeks. She went on to tell me detailed stories about her investigations. Then I found out she refused to live in any second story apartment; she only would live on ground floor apts because she couldn't climb stairs. When I asked why she couldn't climb stairs, she said: "Because my tailbone got chewed off and the remnants of the bone are now being used as a nose-ring for a Latin rock star." Chewed off tailbone sounds pretty serious.
A Latin rock star's tailbone nose-ring, huh? Those are selling for a pretty penny on E-bay right now...and laminated veins- but it's worth the cash- you never know when they might come in handy!
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