ER visit by Mayo man for toe pain Written by a former highway patrolman, now  an RN.  skotcoz@hotmail.com
“One night in the ER, I just took over as charge nurse when one of my younger, female RN’s approached me for some help.
She was having some difficulty discharging one of her clients.
She had given the client his discharge paperwork and nearly 20 minutes passed with the client remaining in the ER room.
When she went in to check on him, he told her to “fuck off!” and in essence, said he’d leave when he was ready.
This was late swing shift, very busy, with a lobby full of sick folks who needed rooms.
I view most of my younger female RN’s as  my little sisters, so I decided this particular ER client needed to have a personal visit from me. As I announced my presence and began to move into the room around the closed curtain, I was met with multiple obscenities launched in my general direction.
He  accused me  of trying to get a peek at the client while in an undressed state. I found it humorous because he was fully dressed minus one shoe. 
The thing that struck me as a bit funnier was he had paused in this state of dress  (minus one shoe) to make a sandwich.
He emptied his backpack onto the exam stretcher which included a loaf of bread, mayo, and cheese.
When I advised him that I didn’t appreciate his candor with my nurse, he cursed at me, told me to get out of his room. He actually ran across the room and pushed my chest with both hands. I didn’t react at first because he really surprised me, and he actually bounced off me. He was kind of methish, about 5′ 9″ and weighed about a buck fifty.
I’m six feet tall and weigh in at about 200.
That being said, the physical contact pissed me off a bit and I warned him against a second attack and what would probably happen to him if he touched me again. Some staff had witnessed the interaction and called security.
Security  arrived and stood behind me as we watched him install that last shoe. I told him to pack up his food and hit the road.
As he was loading his backpack, the verbal onslaught continued. When he finally finished, he tried walking past the group of us patiently waiting for him. I calmly raised a hand to stop him, which he walked right into. He told me he needed to get by me so he could get his bike outside of the lobby. The security guards and I advised him he was leaving by the closest exit, which was the ambulance bay doors about 20 feet away. He protested a bit, but with direction from security he finally left and took the long way around to get his bike.
 On the way out, he found it necessary to shown me some crude gang tattoos.Â
He assumed we would all accept them as threats. My guess is that they may have been real but any gang probably found that this guy was too bat shit crazy to hang with anymore.
This incident is not the weirdest thing to ever happen, just a small picture of  daily life in the ER.
More stories to come.
If anyone was wondering, without giving any confidential information away, Mayo man  was seen for a very minor complaint resembling the acuity of toe pain. Â
P.S. You all  paid for his ER visit.”
 skotcoz@hotmail.com
The author is a former highway patrolman who now is an RN.
Other relevant posts include:Â
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2014/01/medicaid-patients-emergency-department-primary-care.html
http://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/5-unusual-er-visits.htm
Why not screen people when they arrive at the ER and when it is not an emergency then get them scheduled elsewhere?