[Kitsa]

(I'm on bedrest and bored out of my mind, and now you must all suffer.)

I worked in an ER for 8 years. Many of the shifts were evenings and weekends, when the drunkies and weirdos would come in, and it was messed-up. Here are some of the many things that went on, and I'll tack on more when I think of them:

- We had to call in security to forcibly separate a couple trying to have sex in an exam room. It was a Saturday night, and the guy came in stinking drunk with a sprained ankle. Apparently he was hosting a barbecue, they were playing frisbee, and he fell off the air conditioner trying to retrieve the frisbee from the roof. His girlfriend was also stinking drunk, more than a little skanky, and draped all over him. When he was in a wheelchair in triage, she was straddling his lap, making out with him. The nurse got pissed and threw her out of the room. The lady let herself back in and they continued making out. She was escorted by security to the waiting room and told to stay put. She prowled out there for a while, and then managed to sneak back directly behind someone who was let in through the automatic doors. About 5 minutes later we heard the nurse scream, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?!?" Turns out they were having it off right there on the gurney. The woman literally had to be pried off the guy by two burly off-duty cops and hauled outside.

- We once intercepted a woman bringing a sack of Big Macs and fries to a patient who had just been brought in by ambulance for a massive MI (heart attack).

- Our hospital was across from the county fairgrounds, and during fair season we were inundated with carnies who used us as a free clinic. Their MO was to come in with a fake name and address as a self-pay...no tracking them later. One guy came in, leaned over the desk and fiddled with our desk stuff, and said "I gots VD." We sprayed everything with Lysol after he left.

- I once worked a midnight shift where a guy was brought in after a bar fight. Some other guy had beaned him with a golf wedge and they found him wandering in the woods behind the bar, crap in his pants and no idea who he was. The bartender broke into his car and found a paper with his wife's number on it, and that's the only way anyone had any idea who he was.

- Here's another one that happened during fair season...a woman was walking along, minding her own business, when for some reason some idiot in an Elephant Ear booth threw some hot oil out the back window. It literally deep-fried this poor woman's arm. She came screaming into the ER, right past the registration desk, crazy with pain, and started grabbing bottles of water out of people's hands to pour over it (not too sanitary, but her arm literally looked like deep-fried turkey). She was flown out to a burn unit.

-We had a bunch of looney frequent flyers. One we called the "skittles lady" because she (and her forty-some kids, or so it seemed) never came in without a jumbo bag of Skittles. When she got mad, she'd throw skittles at them or at us. The kids would get in the skittles and spread them all over. Every time they left we had to call housekeeping to pry squashed skittles out of the waiting-room carpet.

-We had another guy who called the ambulance so often, for such nonsense things (weird-colored snot, headache, funny-smelling gas) that the ambulance got permission from the city to ignore all calls to his house. That didn't stop him, though. He walked to McDonald's, picked up the payphone, dialed 911 and said there was someone unconscious in the parking lot. Then he went and laid down in a parking space. The EMTs were super-pissed when they saw who it was, but they had to bring him in, because it wasn't his house they'd been called to.

- One summer, this poor old man came in literally smelling like death. He had stumbled about 5 miles along a back road , in 90 degree heat, to get to our ER. The smell was, without question, the worst thing I had ever smelled in my entire life, and I took a class at a body farm. As he got to the front desk, he stumbled, and someone rushed out to hold him up. As they did, a centipede crawled out from under his shirt. He had sores all over his body, and they were all infested with insects of just about every description. Turned out he lived in one of those "houses of squalor", his kids didn't take care of him, and I'm pretty sure they got arrested. (The bad thing about working in the ER is that you don't always know how things turn out).

-We had a teenage girl come in by ambulance for abdominal pain, and she delivered a baby in the ambulance bay. She claimed to be completely unaware she was pregnant. She also hadn't told her mom or her boyfriend, who showed up panic-stricken a few minutes later. The physician handling her went out to tell the family, and the mom freaked the hell out. She attacked the boyfriend in the middle of the waiting room.

- I once had a lady clock me on the side of the head with a phone. She was angry about something stupid, I can't remember what...something like the nurse wasn't letting her back during a procedure or something. She grabbed the phone and swung it by its cord, right into my temple. I had a welt there for a long time.

-One time there was this bratty 13 year old girl who was screwing around with the wheelchairs. She was going up and down the hallway, ramming into things and sneering at the triage nurse who kept telling her to stop. The nurse would say, "cut it out, you're bothering people" and the girl would go "myeeehh, you're bothering people, you're bothering people" and keep on ramming into people's shins and stuff. She was heading down the hallway again when suddenly a broomstick handle shot out from one of the exam room doors, about a foot off the ground, right through the wheels of the chair. The chair stopped cold and the girl about flew out. The nurse's head appeared out of the door and she hissed, "I said, stop it." It was the single most awesome snotty-preteen smackdown I have ever seen.