I was a bit nervous on my next shift. Phillip was working again and it seemed that everywhere I went, Phillip was there, watching me. We actually never acknowledged each others presence at any time. In fact, he and I used to talk every time we saw each other at work, but now the cats out of the bag and we say nothing to each other. What was Phillip going to do next about what he saw? Probably nothing. He didn’t see me hand off the pill bottle after work to Mr. Contact (as I call him) . I was supposed to write another prescription for oxycontin 30’s for a guy named Will Slazel today. He was a regular visitor at the department, usually for back pain, but today, he was my ‘customer’ – a mere $500 was paid out in the room for the bottle of 100 pills. Very cheap relative to the street price. My heart pounded as we proceeded with the transaction. I kept looking at the door to see if it would slam open….in fact moments after I gave the prescription to Will, Phillip walked in, pretending to be re-stocking the room. That was close. I quickly left after that, annoyed at my new shadow.
I called Angela to see how Ryan was doing later in the shift. Ryan had been sleeping wonderfully and so far he has been an easy baby. I count my few blessings. The night went up and down otherwise. I had one mother sign her 6 year old son in at 2 A.M because he said he had ‘heart’ pain. Really? Like there are thousands of 6 year olds having heart attacks, and by the way, why is he up at 2 A.M? It was just a bit of gas that he had, but I had to do the old ‘EKG and chest Xray routine’ to appease the mother so she wouldn’t complain that I demeaned his complaint. The mother weighed about 300 pounds herself and looked like she was having the heart attack! The whole time I was interviewing them, I could have sworn she was videoing me on her phone, because she held it up at me as I spoke and examined her ‘critically ill’ son. Earlier I had another child that had been pushed on the playground into her sibling. The child that had been pushed had a split lip that needed nothing to be done other than some cleaning. The mother mentioned the other child had hit her head, but there was no obvious injury and she wasn’t the patient. I even examined the other child without her being an official patient and said everything was fine, but that wasn’t enough. After I finished with the first cild, the mother promptly checked in the second child to get me to officially ‘see’ the child. Of course nothing was wrong and I sent them both home with a ‘pat on the back’. Nowadays everyone is worried about having a ‘concussion.’ It’s trendy I guess. No matter how small the injury, it’s a concussion. I sneezed – I have a concussion!
I was glad to finish my shift. I drove over to Angela’s to see her and Ryan. Angela has started to slim down a bit after delivering the other week. She is looking sexy again. We decided to be bad this morning and ‘do it’ a bit earlier than we were supposed to since we were supposed to wait 6 weeks after the delivery. As a result, Angela bled a bit, but it had been a long time it seemed, and it was definitely fun!
The way I feel about my patient’s at work sometimes!
Can’t wait until Angela gets her old body back!
-T.C.