Punk be-yotch

Today was a different sort of day; D and I spent all day with just one patient. Ferrying him from home to a MRI, to a doctor appointment and back home again. It was weird spending that long with one person, and reminds me of why I don't want to be a nurse. Because people are annoying if you have to put up with them all day. So here's the shout-out to all the good nurses with the patience to deal with patients for long shifts.

This patient was also very different from our usual "raisin gathering" of geriatric patients. He was 20, partially paralyzed, seemed to think he was tough and/or a gansta, and very vocal. When we first walked in, he thought we were the police (in his defense, we do wear shiny badges), but once he figured out that we were with the ambulance, he opened right up and started telling us all sorts of things we didn't really need to know. He showed us many of his tattoos and harassed his friend about the one he overpaid for. He told us about being hit by the drunk driver and eventually getting the guy's vehicle and smashing it with a 5lb sledgehammer because that was as much as he could lift. About being on steroids. About all the "hot" nurses at the hospital we were taking him to and how he'd love to see a "Nurses Gone Wild" video. I'm fairly certain he and D had some sort of male bonding experience in the back of the ambulance while I was driving - and the only disappointment to me was that they didn't get to spend more time together. He actually apologized for offending me with his foul mouth at one point, and despite the fact that I hadn't been offended, he said he felt bad because he knew he shouldn't act that way.

One of the nice things was that D and I actually had time for lunch today. In a sit-down restaurant - which is truly unheard of at our company. But we'd been dispatched to stay with the guy and the MRI took nearly 2 hours, so off to lunch we went. We also found the antenna for the XM radio that D had been looking for so that we can actually have some decent music in the ambulance. So despite being the weirdest day yet on this job, I'm going to have to call it a success.