Signs that make you drive off the road.

Seriously, is anyone else at all bothered by this??

Morning Woods??!! Are you kidding me??

This neighborhood is on the corner of Danforth and Coltraine.

Seriously, what were they thinking???

2 beers and 2 dudes...

I am always entertained by the excuses/stories that people come up with in the ER. I can't tell you how many times we here, "I've only had two beers" or "I was minding my own business when these two dudes came out of nowhere" or "I must have picked that up from a toilet-seat". We get a kick out of the stories we here. But every once in a great while, we will get a patient that actually tells the truth. This is a story about that patient...

This past weekend, I was working the early shift. About 6:30 am, EMS encodes with an "unresponsive male" in his mid-twenties. Several minutes later, they arrive with one such guy, who has obviously had way too much fun the night before. The guy reeks of alcohol, and finally starts waking up after a one-time dose of Narcan (reversal agent for Opiate medication). Anyway, the more time that goes by, the more this guy starts to reveal his antics from that night. And surprisingly, he is actually a pretty nice, and very funny guy. He admits to drinking very heavily (and in fact, his blood alcohol level was 0.34 which is more than 4x the legal limit), as well as doing several different street-drugs. Okay, fast-forward several minutes...the guy is getting rolled back from getting a CT scan of his head and sees me talking to a police officer that apparently, he knows on a first-name basis. This is how the rest of the story plays out...

Patient: "Heeey (in a super-inebriated voice), Officer Smith"
Smith turns to me and in a very confused voice says, "Who the heck is that guy?"
I assumed that Smith must have had multiple run-ins with this guy, but after explaining the situation to him, he still can not figure out who this patient is, or why he would know him.
A few minutes, the curiosity is killing Smith, so he goes into the room and says, "Hey man, did you just say 'Officer Smith' out there??"
Patient: "Yeah man....don't you remember me??"
Smith: "honestly, no."
Patient: "Duuuuude. You taught my D.A.R.E. program."
Surprised Smith: "Man! What are you doing here?!"
Patient: (laughing now) "you didn't do a good job, man. you didn't do a good job"

Q is for...Q-tip!!!

First let me say, love them! Use them EVERY SINGLE day. Don't know what I would do without this beautifully constructed piece of cotton...

Okay, there! I said it. Please don't tell any of the ENT's that I have to call on a semi-daily basis! They would be so disappointed, because doesn't EVERYONE know, that you are not supposed to put anything "smaller than your elbow" into your ear canal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, heard it a million times. But, I must admit that I have a very hard time passing on advice, that I myself cannot accept.

In the past four years, I have seen just about anything that is smaller than a marble, get stuck in the ear. Here is a short-list of some of my treasures: erasers, roaches, watch battery, pinto bean, necklace-bead, and last but not least (and definitely the prize-winner for "most-commonly-not-making-it-out-of-an-ear-canal", and thus the reason for this post) is the dreaded Q-Tip head. In the beginning, I really did start questioning my relationship with Q-Tips. I felt totally duped into believing that Q-Tips were actually there to help me. And you know what, for a little while, our friendship really did start to suffer. Until one day, I decided to do a little research on my patients coming in with "Q-Tips" in their ears. You know what I found??? They weren't really "Q-Tips" at all....no my friends, they were "cotton tipped swabs".

Seriously, I always ask now, and the answer is always, "generic Q-Tips". Hallelujah!!! It was a beautiful-reunion, and I have never questioned my Q-Tips since. So, back to the advice I now give my patients, and the advice I will pass on to you...

I love Q-Tips. I will never stop using them. If you are going to use them, they are to be used everyday. Not once a week, not every two weeks (this just causes severe wax-impaction in the back of the ear-canal). And please, please, please....do not pinch-pennies when it comes to these. Buy the real-thing.