quotes of the day

...from a patient with a completely, totally squashed fractured foot, on being told that he would need to pick up copies of the xrays he had done at our wee primitive local emergency room to take to his followup appointment with the orthopedist, so the orthopedist could look at them:
"I'm not fucking going to any appointment with a doctor who doesn't even have a way to look at my fucking xrays on a computer. I'd rather have the broken foot." What can you say? I said "Okay then."

...and as a runner up: "I just don't know what to do - they told me at Planned Parenthood that I'm six weeks pregnant with twins, and my boyfriend took off when I told him and hasn't been answering phone calls - I mean, he's not allowed to see his two other kids, so I guess it freaked him out a little bit, and we've only known each other like a month - and I'm really scared because I use cocaine and I drink like 10 beers a night - and I don't have a job and I'm not done with school, and if I had a baby I'd have to drop out of school, and I'm living right now on my friend's sofa because I can't afford my own place and it's really loud there and I wouldn't be able to stay there with a baby, but... I just can't decide what the right thing to do is." oh, sister. the right thing to do involves a suction device, a drug rehab program, and an industrial strength piggybank.

I also had one of my sweet lovely postpartum girls - in the agony of indecision about what kind of birth control she wanted to use - ask me what kind of birth control _I_ use. I was totally taken aback. She comes from a tiny little village in Mexico where you hang onto your virginity like grim death until you get married at seventeen, and while I'm not making any assumptions about what the men get up to, it's really, really unusual for the women to have had any partners other than their husbands. Once I'd turned pink and said, "er, nothing right now; I'm single," I didn't want to horrify her by then saying, "oh, but with previous boyfriends I've used xyz" because, really, who wants to know that about their doctor? eeuw.

okay, enough procrastinating. I still have seven charts to finish.... urgh....