Really?!?!?!?!

Apparently 68 hours of work in one week is too much for Toni. I'm becoming homicidal. I swear if I have to triage one more child with vomiting and diarrhea or female-of-child-bearing-age over-dramatic-female abd pain, I'm going to completely loose it. In the case of the n/v/d kiddos, it's called the stomach flu. It's called viral gastroenteritis. It's called your kid is freaking fine, stop force feeding them milk, try small sips of water/pedialyte/gatorade/insert any clear liquid here. They will get over it. It will go away. The fact that your child has thrown up for the last less-than-24-hours, and has had diarrhea for the same time is NOT an emergency. Kids throw up. So do adults. Put your child to bed, try SMALL sips of a CLEAR liquid, call the doctor in the morning if they're not better, and you still think they're dying any minute. That way your doctor's office staff can deal with your well child and I don't have to. That is what they get paid for. You know what I get paid for? Doing chest compressions, cracking open chests, stopping strokes and heart attacks, breathing for people who are not doing so on their own. Don't even get me started on the tylenol/motrin speech. They didn't want to take it? Did they want to have a seizure? That's your other option. They're 2. Who's the adult here?!!! Worse comes to worst, they have rectal tylenol at any drug store. It works.

Now for the stupid over dramatic females of child-bearing age. We are going to give you an IV. We are going to draw your blood. We are going to make you drink nasty stuff for a CT scan. We are going to send you for an ultrasound that will require pushing on your belly. We are perhaps going to have to put a catheter in to get a clean urine sample since 98% of the population seems incapable of getting a clean catch. And we will likely need to do a pelvic exam. It's going to happen. You came to the ER, this is what you get. This is not Burger King. You don't get it your way. You don't get to pick and choose what treatments you would like to have with your side of fries. If you already know what it is or precisely what you do and don't need to have done, do it yourself since you apparently have a medical degree. If you think you know what you have, great. Deal with it and call your doctor in the morning. They'll be much more likely to put up with your drama. Also, pain does not necessitate the making of sound. For the love of all that is good and holy. We know that you hurt. Making sounds for hours on end that would make a porn star blush while moaning profanities is NOT going to make us a) think you hurt any more than you are capable of telling us in a normal toned non-whining voice that you are, or b) get you to a room to be seen any faster. If you are not in the active end stages of labor, you absolutely do NOT under ANY circumstances need to make ANY noise!!!! The only sound I want to hear from you is your non-crying-non-whining rational voice telling me what precisely is going on. I can't type, I wahhahhha--ooohhhhh----wahhhhh ----ooohhhh in your triage note and the fact that you're taking 20 minutes to tell me you have had left upper quadrant pain for the last three weeks is doing nothing but delaying your treatment and the treatment of the 45 other people in the waiting room. You may grimace, you may be teary, this is ok, but sit up in the chair and tell me what is wrong in a manner that I can understand you so that we can fix it. You do not need to flop like a dead fish in my triage chair like a limp rag doll with no self control. You drove yourself here. You are capable of sitting in a reasonable manor.

That is all I have to say. Now I'm going to bed.