Friday, January 12, 2007

Best Chief Complaint Ever!

On my last ER shift (better known as the "projectile pus day"), I had my favorite chief complaint EVER. It was: "abdominal pain s/p (status post = after) eating a large amount of butter beans and pig tails."
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For those of you not from the South, butter beans are lima beans. And down here, apparently they are occasionally consumed in such large quantities that they cause abdominal pain (read: gas) severe enough to drive patients to the ER. In this ER, we round at every shift change, and so the offgoing resident was presenting this lady, in all her housecoat-and-hair-curlers glory, and when he said "butter beans and pigtails," we were all kind of looking at each other with puzzled expressions. Only a few of the group were from the South, and so when they realized that we all thought "pig tails" were some kind of breakfast pastry or the like, they said, "NO, they're actually the tails of the pig. She was eating actual pig tails!!" Then there was a collective, "Ohhhhh...." Apparently this is a combination not unknown to the Grady ER, so all when we had given her some fluids and proved that she could tolerate PO liquids (liquids by mouth), we let her go. She was the cutest thing - she had her walker with her, and she called it "Old Bessie."

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