Fun with pictures

Call it Wordless Tuesday. Except with words. Lots of 'em.

So Sparrow and I are on together tonight. Which, so very rocks.

(PS - did I mention that Sparrow had a birthday last week? I think I forgot. She had her first 29th birthday this past week. We went out for "Asian Fusion" - if several days later - and it was yummy. The company was impeccable, of course, as well...)

(Ruthie's birthday is today, also. I made an impromptu little banner on our door using Post-It notes.)

(But I digress.)

So Sparrow and I are here. And we had a lot of funny, funny stuff come across our paths last night. So we decided to take pictures (you'll notice that all the patient identifiers are conveniently missing...).

Shortly after I came on, a direct admission came from one of the community hospitals. I went down, signed her in, talked to her a bit, and then came back upstairs and looked through the thick envelope of material that the outside hospital sent with her.

I found about twenty pages of MARs (medication administration records), which was ridiculous because this woman is on exactly ONE medication. And of course, they sent a big stack of nursing notes.

Notably missing? A discharge summary. Or, say, a psych consult note. But in case you were worried, we got her post-endoscopy nursing notes, too.

Absolutely essential to good psychiatric care.

They also...seriously, I almost fell off my chair when I saw this. This is not a diagnosis.

The word is hypokalemia. I mean, really. They are just makin' shit up at this point.

You know you're in good hands when your doctors start making up diagnoses just for you. That's a sure sign that they really know what they're doing.

Also waiting for me when I came in was this hand-off note:

Oh, but, be sure to notice the patient's age.

It's the the Playskool Trenchcoat Mafia out there. They're just starting younger and younger these days. Sparrow tells me she got a report from a parent the other day that some three year old girl was "pole dancing". Really? A three year old taking off her clothes. Astonishing. That's highly unusual. Toddlers almost never like to run around naked.

And furthermore, pole dancing is not an innate talent, unless you're a surgeon (inside joke. Sorry...). So if you find your little one working the pole at Gymboree...you've got ask yourself where she could possibly have learned that behavior.

I'm just sayin'.