Patient request from an emergency medicine casebook I'm reading: "I want a depo shot and a panic attack."
Oh geez, the next case has a figure with caption "Verbatim response of a patient who was asked why he urinated on three walls of his examination room"
The reason? He was "marking his territory."
If this sorta stuff is what I have to look forward to doing EM, damn is it gonna be a wild ride.
That chapter also features someone spreading weed on a finger for pain relief (it didn't work, but they did let him keep the weed), an impromptu nose piercing with a bullet (don't run towards the gunshots!), a teen putting lemonade in a urine test cup ("the lemonade was sterile, and the pregnancy test was negative"), and quote "I'm not sexually active, I'm married" (which I'm not entirely sure how to interpret)
Anyways, if you want to read those, they're from Extraordinary Cases in Emergency Medicine by Douglas Brunette, specifically Chapter 10, "Intriguing"
Key learning points
- Paruresis is a psychiatric condition that describes a social phobia of urinating in public bathrooms.
- This patient did not have paruresis.
The outcome is also intriguing: "We referred the patient to the OB/GYN clinic for her 'depo shot,' but we did not provide her with a 'panic attack.'"