Fun night

Not long got back from a merry  6 hours stint in the emergency room.  I got the “fast track” status and even then it took three hours to see a doctor, although I must say that A&E nurse practitioners that have the ability to write orders for their own analgesics are your friends in cases like this.

 

If you need to chew on someone, do so on the administration staff, not the ones with the key to the narcotics cabinet.  Trust me on this one.

 

I can say with some conviction and experience that intravenous morphine is good stuff – you can go from sweating and convulsing from pain to sitting up and having a nice chat in about four minutes, and the only remaining issue is that it takes your stomach muscles a while to realise it’s over for a bit and stop their cramping.  Bananas are the go in lieu of a potassium shot, which would have had to be an IM stick due to only having single-feed cannulas in, and at that stage I had two large-bore IVs in and was a bit over being punctured.

 

So what was the problem?  Impending testicular torsion.  In retrospect not as bad as gallstones, but a very close second.

 

When the A&E triage nurse asked me for a pain rating I said it was about 5/10… but that after 4 hours of it continuously it was becoming a bit wearing on my normally sunny demeanour.  Ooh, step right in sir.  Not allergic to anything, sir?  Ever had codeine before?  Morphine?  Cool, let’s start you on 50mg morphine, 50mg of codeine and 500mg of paracetamol.  Let me know immediately if your stomach hurts.

 

That lasted me about two hours and when I started having mild convulsions again they said they couldn’t give me any more orally due to stomach irritation.  I pointed out a nice vein in the back of my hand and 5 minutes later, bliss.  You can’t even feel the freaking ice cold fingers of the doctor palpating (read: squeezing the crap out of) assorted things, and manoeuvring (read: take a good hold, make a wish and HOIK) said things back were they should be.  Luckily for me, no signs of anything being torn, so nothing needs to be stitched back into place.

 

At one point the (Asian female) doctor asked if she was causing any discomfort.  I replied that compared to previously, no, that it beat the hell out of the last similar experience which involved a scalpel, a model boathook and a bovie, and that she should rest  absolutely assured that I would communicate clearly and promptly any dissatisfaction with the current treatment regime.

 

What caused this?  Calley let the puppy into the bedroom to “wake me up” the other morning.  10kg of puppy took a flying leap onto the bed and ground zero was my nads.  Thanks for that one.

 

Get a dog, they said.  It will be fun, they said.