I am a medical assistant. This kind of exchange happens on a too-regular basis.
I enter the waiting room and call a patient’s name. The patient stares at me. I pause before calling the patient’s name again.
Patient: “That’s me…”
Me: “We’re ready for you.”
Patient: “Oh!”
They get up and follow me back.
It’s October of 2021. I just got braces around four or five weeks ago, and they also put something called a bite block (turbo/ramp) on the back of my two front teeth, so I’ve been talking with a lisp now.
My job is regarding [contagious illness] cases, but things have gotten slow and cases have been low, leaving me with a lot of downtime. I ask my supervisor if there is anything I can do in my downtime, and she gives me a project to work on. The pop-up diabetes clinic they recently opened does not have a front desk clerk yet — they are in the process of hiring one — so I can help them out with patient outreach.
Sure, why not? I have to call patients with high HbA1c (glycated hemoglobin) levels to schedule their appointments and also call patients to remind them of their appointments. It sounds easy enough.
The first person I have to call is an older woman.
Me: “Hi, Mrs. [Patient]. We ran a report, and your hemoglobin levels are high. We would like to schedule you an appointment with—”
Patient: *Cutting me off* “WHAT? I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU SAID!”
I repeat it again, slowly.
Patient: “Yeah? And what about it?”
Me: “We would like to schedule you an appointment for the diabetes clinic.”
Patient: “Okay. What day? Can it be this Friday?”
I begin to inform her that we only have this pop-up clinic on Mondays, but she cuts me off again, yelling.
Patient: “I ASKED IF IT COULD BE FRIDAY, AND I CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU DUE TO THE WAY YOU TALK! YOU ARE NOT MAKING ANY SENSE!”
Me: “I apologize for my lisp, ma’am.”
Patient: “WELL, I CAN’T UNDERSTAND THE WAY YOU TALK!”
Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am. Someone else will call you to set up an appointment.”
She gets angry about that, as well.
Patient: “You called me just to tell me someone else will be calling me? Am I getting the appointment or not?!”
After that, I spoke to her veerrrryyyyyy slowly and loudly, and what should’ve taken me five minutes to schedule ended up taking fifteen minutes. I still had to repeat myself a couple of times, too.
After that, I called around thirty other patients, and no one else had a problem with the way I talked. My colleagues don’t think my lisp is that bad, either; one of them didn’t even notice I HAD a lisp.
I have to call [Patient] to remind her of her appointment soon. That will be fun.
I am a doctor in a hospital. At around 5:00 in the evening, we got a call that Code Black had been announced in the hospital. This meant that a mass casualty had occurred and the patients were being sent our way. Two buses had collided with each other; some patients were mildly injured, but some of them had serious injuries.
Around that time, a mother had brought her son to the hospital to consult into emergency because her son was having a minor stomachache and was refusing to eat food. I personally went to talk to her.
Me: “Ma’am, a large number of patients are coming here with trauma due to an accident. We’ll help them first to avoid fatalities. You and your son can either wait in the hall or go to the department of medicine and someone will attend you there.”
She started to make a fuss.
Woman: “You’re refusing to do your duty! You’re here just to trouble the patients!”
At the same time, the first two ambulances arrived, and both of the patients were injured badly. On seeing that, the security guards had to clear the entrance to the emergency room, and they asked the woman to move aside. When she refused to do so, they called a female guard, and she helped push the woman and her son aside. She started to scream like a banshee.
Woman: “You assaulted me! You assaulted my son and me! I’m going to call the police and file charges against you for harassment!”
We ignored her shouting and screaming.
We took the ambulance patients inside and gave their wounds support to stop the bleeding enough that they could be taken into the surgery room to locate the wounds, completely stop the bleeding, and check for any further damage.
The woman came back into the ER with her son, and of course, we were there and there was blood around the floor.
Woman: *Shouting* “You’re going to give us infections and make us sick with all this blood!”
We again had to ask the guards to escort her out as the ambulances with other, less injured patients had started to come in. We were tending to those patients when the woman tried to stop the entry of a patient who was not very injured but needed a full examination.
Woman: “This patient is fine! My baby needs treatment first!”
Remember, we had already told her to go to the other department, but she did not want to walk even a small distance to have her baby evaluated and treated.
This time, she actually called the police and tried to pester us again. One of my fellow doctors approached the police and told them about the whole scenario. They already knew that we were treating the patients. The woman had told them that we had refused to take in any patients and were making them wait outside.
At the end, the policemen took the woman outside, gave her a nice earful of some well-deserved strong words, and slapped her with a nice hefty fine. She was banned from the hospital for two weeks.
Later, we did treat her son, and it all turned out to be a sham. The whole problem was that the child did not get the food he had demanded, so he made a fuss about it.
On the brighter side, all of the patients from the accident were completely treated, and today, the last patient was discharged from the wards. They are all doing perfectly fine.
Some people really have the audacity to be such idiots in emergency scenarios for nothing but attention and drama.
I am a caretaker/handyman/groundskeeper at a local church in a town in Sweden. I am mending a snow-damaged light fixture when a very, very troubled young man, around twenty years old, approaches me. He speaks in a small, uneasy tone as if he is truly afraid of something.
Man: “Excuse me. Are you a priest? I urgently need to talk to one about the nature of the divine.”
Me: “No, but let me take you to the vicar. She knows most things about the divine.”
Man: “The vicar? Oh, no, I am far too unimportant. But… maybe you can answer my question? I am really scared.”
Me: “Um, probably not, but you can ask it and we’ll see if I can answer?”
Man: “Does the Almighty have black leather rubber Wellington boots, fashioned from the skin of Satan?”
Yes, he said, “…leather rubber Wellingtons.” (Lädergummistövlar.)
Me: “…”
Man: “Like it says in the Gospel of Exterminations?”
Me: “Where, you said?”
Man: “The Book of Annihilations, the sixth book that Moses wrote?”
Me: “You know, let’s go to the vicar.”
Man: “No, I can’t. She’s probably, like, busy!”
Me: “Let’s go! Come now!”
We go to the vicar and the man — who seems terrified of the wide-smiled woman in a knitted, rainbow-patterned sweater — begs me to stay, so I do. The man asks his question again, with a lot more details about the passage from the gospel that doesn’t exist.
Vicar: “Who told you this?”
Man: “Well, a… friend… heard in a dream that he had while being awake that if you didn’t do the right thing at any one time in your life, then the Almighty would stomp on you for all eternity in Hell. And the Wellingtons are from the skin of the… one down there… since it is really painful for humans to touch, and… and I am really worried! I don’t want the Almighty to stomp on me!”
Vicar: “I understand, and that sounds like a terrifying image in your mind. I have read the entire Good Book. The Lord does not need to make shoes out of anyone, and he doesn’t stomp on anyone. If you are worried, just try to live your best life.”
Man: *Relaxing visibly* “Thank you. How?”
Vicar: “Well, we have a volunteer group for helping the mobility impaired, and… well, we’ll go to the bulletin board in the hallway to have a look. And don’t be worried. God will not punish you for trying to be a good person; we are fallible and that is how He made us. And since your… your… friend… makes you troubled by these dreams, we should help him or her to get to a nice doctor who will make those dreams go away.”
And so, we got a very enthusiastic volunteer for most of our programs, like helping the elderly get groceries or reading stories for preschoolers.
Oh, and “his friend” stopped having the awake-dreams not long after the man had a short stay at the psychiatric ward.
I’m in the emergency room being checked out for some extreme pain. They’re going over some medical history questions, and we come to the “Are you pregnant?” section.
Doctor: “Any chance you’re pregnant?”
Me: “Nope.”
Doctor: “Completely sure?”
Me: “I haven’t had sex in five years, my tubes are tied, and I have an IUD. If I’m pregnant at this point, it’s the will of God.”
Doctor: “…but are you sure?”
They ran a pregnancy test anyway. To nobody’s surprise, it came back negative.
