Like our patient the other day. He came in handcuffed with the local police to be seen for an arm injury, and as soon as he stepped foot into the ER he sucked in a deep breath and launched into a nonstop verbal tirade. Racial slurs, sexually explicit threats, spitting at staff and on the floor, insults about staff's physical looks...if you can think of it and it's awful, he said it. And since this is the ER and we don't do anything about it, instead of throwing the guy out he got to stay in our department all night long. Once he started spitting at staff he got medicated with some haldol and ativan, so we were blessed with a few hours of quiet at that point.
When the patient first came in he had a backpack full of stuff. We emptied it out to check for weapons, and sure did confiscate like three knives and a meth pipe. Also found were multiple CLEARLY stolen items - watches, credit cards with different names, money, earrings, plus a couple of lottery scratchers. Why he didn't go to jail instead of the ER is still something I'm fuming over. BUT - I got my revenge. Oh boy, did I ever.
I can't take his money because that's stealing. I can't throw his stuff away because it's "his" stuff even though clearly stolen and the police didn't want it back because they don't give a shit. I couldn't throw him out of the ER or refuse to treat him.
So you know what I did? While he was sleepy from the medications, I scratched his lottery scratcher tickets. Every single one of them. None of them won anything, but that's not the point. The point is that I LEFT THEM WITH HIS STUFF. I scratched his lottery tickets, they lost, and I put them back into his stuff so he knows someone did it and wanted him to know they did.
Maybe it was wrong and I shouldn't have done that. But you know what? The medic who was the target of most of the racial slurs thought it was brilliant, so I'm okay with my choices here.
2 comments:
Scratching off a losers dream of wealth...was brilliant! lol
I think you showed great inner strength by just scratching off his lottery tickets, that's pretty benign. Old school nurses were famous, or perhaps infamous, for behavior modification techniques like aggressive suctioning and level of consciousness checks. That old grating the styloid process against the mandible trick brought even the most hardy of evil-doers to their knees.
When I worked at Downey VA hospital with really violent folks we were taught how to inject an aggressive moving target. The syringe was grasped in a fist with the thumb on the plunger and quickly darted into the site and the heck with aspiration. Not exactly according to Hoyle, but the technique did minimize the chance of injury.
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