Just finished a 36 hour shift and I am still too wired from coffee and Rockstar energy drinks to even think about sleep. Most of my shift was spent on house call for the hospital medical floors, but also in the ED some as well. The shift started, almost two days ago now, with an admission of a young achondroplasiac, or midget (little person may be the current runner on the euphemism treadmill), who was also afflicted with several other unfortunate disorders that had left her, although fairly sound of mind, essentially bed ridden. She did have a boyfriend, however, and when I arrived the nurses informed me that she had been on the phone with him all morning, and talking rather dirty about what they were going to do when he arrived, in the bathroom. I immediately began cursing him as a scumbag who was no doubt taking advantage of this poor girl, but when he arrived he was a little person as well, who had met the girl at a convention for little people, like you may have seen on "little people big world". I felt bad for the bad thoughts I had had about him so, when he came to the desk, asking for a nurse to transport him down to the ED to visit his grandmother, who was also a pt., I quickly volunteered. All the nurses were busy, so I thought I would help out. To make a long story short, I dropped him off at his grandmother's room in the ED. An hour or so later, I learned from the security guards that he had been removed from the department a short time after arriving because they had caught him in bed with his grandmother, snapping the radish (masturbating)!

Later that day I was relaxing in the department when a group of EMS personnel and civilians came quickly into the department yelling and in a state of general chaos. They had a big piilowcase with them that was writhing about. There was a snake inside, and it wasn't quite dead yet. A man had been biten in his garage by a rattlesnake, and they had brought it with them for identification by us. After clubbing the squirming mass a few times with Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine text, we were able to remove it safely from the pillowcase and see that it was, in fact, an eastern diamondback rattler. The man was elderly, and walked with a walker. As he told the story, he had come into his garage and the snake had been hiding in some corner, from where it struck. He fell to the ground and turned with his walker and knocked the snake from his leg. He whacked it with the walker a second time and then, as he put it, "it crawled off one way and I crawled off the other."