Stories of moronic patients are second on the list of the most popularly-requested A&E ‘anecdotes (number one being, of course, the sorts of things that people insert inside themselves and then get x-rayed when they won’t come out again.)
So here’s the first of what will probably turn out to be occasional brief rants about such people.
The woman who booked in because her false fingernail had come off and she wanted us to stick it back in place.
The woman who actually called ‘999′ (the emergency services number) for an ambulance because she had chewing gum stuck in her hair. In fact the trick to get chewing gum off clothes is to put the clothing in a freezer for a couple of hours so the gum goes hard and can be cracked off. So I advised the patient to go home and stick her head in the freezer for a couple of hours.
Of course I didn’t actually. The General Medical Council frown on that sort of thing. But it’s what I wanted to tell her.
The weird thing is that a lot of medical soaps cover exactly this sort of thing these days - inappropriate use of resources, ambulances tied up with trivia while the elderly man quietly dies form his heart attack - that sort of thing. But the eejits who pitch up with their gummed hair and broken nails either don’t watch popular TV shows as they are too busy attending museums and art galleries (unlikely), or they are just so stupid that they can’t see the comparison.
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