Friday, March 28 , 2003.
Welcome to Detroit: Be careful who you try to rob, sonny boy.
I always
knew Amy subconsciously loved my unshowered
man smell.
She just doesn't know it.
SELL CRAZY SOMEWHERE ELSE
One of the first pages I got in the hospital yesterday was a nurse calling about Mr. Knieval, a new patient today.
"Just wanted you to know we found Mr. Knieval running up and down the third floor -- naked. We're keeping him in restraints until psych sees him," the male nurse casually informed me.
Third floor. That's Ob/Gyn. Kind of a funny place to see a crazy 27-year old naked running man, I suppose.
When my team of residents got to his designated room on the fifth floor, the commotion was obvious.
The senior resident uttered the always ominous,
"Is that our patient's room?"
Nurses, security, assistants were all bottlenecking the door to our streaker-patient's room. This isn't right, I didn't hear any CPR call.
Outside the room, was an older nurse in a chair, sobbing in emotional shock. The right side of her face was bruised and swollen.
Inside, was a mob of people restraining our patient on the floor. I could only see his arm sticking out, with bright blood on it. Next to him was a bed with a scared 90 year old man, too weak to move and mumbling. Sheets with red streaks were strewn about.
Just beyond the old man's bed was the remains of the window. A cool breeze passed through from outside as I squinted in disbelief. There was a jagged man-sized hole in the security glass as if a cannonball had shot through, with large shards still hanging via plastic coating. These windows are reinforced and supposedly unbreakable.
As more security arrived, we gradually picked up pieces of the story like shards from the "unbreakable" window. The patient's sister was there the whole time.
Apparently after our crazy naked streaker patient was brought back to his room he was put in a posey vest and restrained. He remained peaceful and calm, even when the psychiatrist saw him. He was left in the restraint vest and a sitter was placed in his room to watch him.
He then decided he had to leave STAT, and went from calm to psychotic in the wink of a race queen's eye. He escaped from his restraining vest, tore out his I.V. (blood), and then his Foley catheter (more blood).
[The catheter that was in his penis was secured with a small balloon in his bladder. You're supposed to deflate the internal balloon prior to removing the catheter for painfully bloody obvious reasons. But who has time for details when your crazy self is calling.]
The sitter ran out to get help (i.e., ran for her life) once things got out of hand (i.e., flying bloody penis catheter).
The 27-year old evil Mr. Knieval bolted toward the exit, only to encounter people blocking the doorway already.
He spun around, leaped ONTO his immobile 90-year old neighbor's chest. Steadied himself (on the old man's ribcage). And dove for the window with such force, he actually made it half way through the reinforced glass window. Without a helmet.
[NOTE: Apparently, years before I became a doctor, a patient went into a steroid-induced psychosis and jumped out of the window - killing himself. That's when these reinforced windows were put into place to prevent such things. Now I have the distinction of having the second patient in the history of my hospital to ever try jumping out of a window.]
As he struggled to finish his five-story rendition of The Fall Guy (old '80s TV show), the older nurse and sister pulled him back in at which point he struck his sister and hammerfisted the nurse in the eye.
By that time, he was swarmed by a security guard and everyone else. My team and I arrived just before three more 240-pound security guards put him in four-point leather restraints. He had lacerations and blood all over his arms but nowhere else amazingly. Even his penis looked okay from the outside.
"I'm okay," he said after I asked. I admit it seemed a bit ironic to be asking him if he was okay with four security guards pinning him down and three other battered innocents in the room. But they were already being attended to.
"So this is your patient, Dr. Scott? Never seen anything like this in 28 years," the veteran nurse tsk-tsk'ed me.
"But I just met the guy," I defended.
"Are you taking the place of the nurse that got hit?" I changed the subject.
"Somebody's gotta do it," she sighed as if I had just martyred her.
The team taking care of the 90-year old rushed in for emotional support. His attending told me how he was the nicest sweetest man she'd ever met, and how he was utterly helpless while MY crazy patient decided to play the one-act-only human trampoline version of Jack*ss. The sweet helpless old man at the end of his golden years was utterly traumatized by MY patient.
Um ... sorry?
Did someone misread the memo I sent out? I wanted the old COREAN patients, not the C-R-RAZY patients.
The rest of the day was less eventful, except for people I knew and people I didn't (even a drug rep of all people) coming up to me and saying,
"Hey, I heard about that patient of yours who beat up a nurse and a 90-year old man, and then tried to jump out the window ...."
"That just happened a half hour ago, how do you know about that already? And who are you anyways?" I replied the first time.
Eventually I stopped asking, and would just add,
"You forgot the part about him streaking naked through the Ob/Gyn floor."
Sometimes the only sense things make is chronological sense.
EPILOGUE
I tried taking a picture of the window but it was already boarded up and covered with cardboard today. I actually took another look out of a neighboring window and there was a mini-rooftop below just two stories down, so he probably wouldn't have died if he made it out. He'd just be transferred to ortho then (i.e., the "bone surgeons"). As of now, psych doesn't even want his crazed f***ed-up ass.
______________________________
MEDEA SIN HOT MODEL
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