My vagina has a fever?

Recently we had an 18 year old girl on our unit for a few days after her open-heart surgery. Long story short, she was mixing her drugs with some not-so-sanitary things (pond water, among other things...) and shooting those up. As anyone with a shred of foresight could imagine, pond water does not belong in the circulatory system, and she developed massive bacteremia. She ultimately became super septic and developed lots of fun things like septic emboli to her brain, spleen and lungs; vegetations on ALL FOUR of her heart valves; and acute kidney injury.

I met her after getting all of her valves fixed. Amazingly, she came through the surgery beautifully. Because she had all of her valves intervened upon (two repairs and two replacements), she was on pump quite a long time. The combination of her massive amounts of narcotics we had to give her and her probable pump head made her a little weird.

Her only complaint after surgery? "My vagina has a fever." Not kidding. She was afebrile, had no rashes or anything weird down there. But she was adament that her vagina was too hot. She insisted on laying in bed, spread eagle, with a fan pointed directly at her vagina. Pulling her gown down over her lap increased the temperature, so she kept it pulled up to her waist. And she had a basin of ice water that we had to keep refilling that she would dip a washcloth in and wet the area almost constantly.

It was a little awkward. She had a young, male nurse. He thought it was awkward. Her mother thought it was awkward. Her father thought it was really awkward. She did not think it was awkward.

This lasted for two days.

Facebook, you don't know me at all

You know how Facebook (and all sorts of other sites) tailors their ads to individuals? Like, you google "Hawaii" and then you start seeing ads for hotels on Waikiki? Well, Facebook loves to give me ads for nursing and EMS related things, probably because those are listed as my professions on my profile. Usually I get things like scrubs, stethoscopes, steel-toed boots, etc. Recently though, I've been getting a lot of ads for nursing/EMS clothing.

These clothes are so cutesy and obnoxious and unprofessional and frankly embarassing. So then I started googling to see if these kind of things were common. They are. 

A sample: 

 

 

I mean really... who wears this shit??  For future reference, Facebook and your advertisers, not me! 

 PS: The parents wearing "My daughter is a paramedic" thongs, we've progressed to a whole 'nother issue I think...

You never really had chest pain did you...?

Communications: "Medic 14, you're going to Restaurant-Across-The-Street-From-The-ER for 45 year old male with chest pain."

...drive, sirens, etc...

Me: "Hello sir, what's going on tonight?"

Mr. Iwannamorphine: "Oh honey, got some bad chest pain."

...dramatically get into the amubulance...

Me: "Tell me about this chest pain."

Mr. Iwannamorphine: "Well my tooth is killing me and it hurts so bad that it makes me have chest pain. Gotta give me some morphine, you gotta."

Me: "Here's some aspirin. For your 'chest pain.'"

Mr. Iwannamorphine: "Naw, don't need aspirin. That chest pain is gone now. It's the tooth. Teeth only respond to morphine."

Teeth only respond to morphine. I clearly skipped that day in nursing school AND medic class.

We go to the ER (less than 1 minute transport time). He went to triage, because well he had dental pain... And to my surprise, come to find out, he had walked out of the ER 3 minutes prior to calling 911, after waiting about 15 minutes and not being seen.

 They only offer ibuprofen in triage... Making this a great idea.