A Reasonable Reaction To The Raving
My pharmacy has two consulting rooms that our certified nurses can use for things such as injections. I’d just given an adult woman several vaccines in consulting room one; as she’d had three injections, she’d ended up with two needles in one arm.
Because this was a vaccine, I needed my patient to wait in the pharmacy for fifteen minutes to make sure there was no adverse reaction. We have chairs outside the consulting rooms for these purposes.
While I was dealing with this woman, my coworker had been giving some injections to a baby, who had a brother who was probably about three years old. Like most three-year-olds, he was standing on a chair to look at his baby sibling in his mother’s arms, mostly greatly concerned at the baby’s crying over their needles, but with just a little bit of mischievous glee over schadenfreude.
It was as my patient sat down that my coworker asked the boy to come over, and the boy realised that not only was his sibling getting needles, but HE WAS AS WELL. I watched as he processed this in a split second that went in slow motion. There was confusion. Realisation. Horror. Betrayal.
And as any good three-year-old does, he promptly turned around and screamed as loud as he could, kicking out with his feet as his mother picked him up to take him to the nurse.
To his mother’s credit, she calmed him almost instantly. Unfortunately, his single act of violence had put the full force of his kicking feet right into the arm of my patient — the arm that had just had two shots. I even saw the cotton ball that had been there fall to the ground.
My patient went white and bent over, clutching her arm. She didn’t move at all while the child was wrangled into the consulting room, or as his wails trailed away to nothing.
Me: “Ma’am? Are you okay?”
Patient: “…is he gone?”
Me: “Pardon?”
Patient: “Is. The kid. Gone?”
Me: “…yes, ma’am.”
Patient: *Emphatically* “FFFF**********K!”
