You Can't Make This S--- Up
RURAL MEDICINE INTEREST GROUP
Robyn Hitchcock MD FAAEM
T
he local dialysis unit calls saying they have an agitated woman who ripped out her dialysis catheters and is talking about suicide because her dog was killed yesterday so they are sending her to the emergency department. Which I am super excited about because like most critical access hospitals, we do not have inpatient dialysis and I will not be able to complete this lady’s dialysis. If she has life-threatening electrolyte disturbances I can’t fix it, nor will I be able to send her anywhere to fix it. Happy Monday. She gets into the emergency department and her vitals are normal. Her EKG is stable suggesting her potassium should be okay. But she is restless, angry, pacing the room and intermittently slamming the glass doors. We start our usual medical work up and call the psychiatric evaluation team who agrees with me that she really looks more angry than crazy. I had gotten the rest of the department settled down so I was able to tuck aside some time to sit down and really talk with her. I walk into the room and see a woman with pink hair, in the psych eval mandated blue paper scrubs, looking and acting really angry. I asked her if she wanted to talk. “About what?” She says. “Well, why don’t we start with what happened at dialysis. The nurses say you got upset and ripped out your catheters.” “I might have ripped out the catheters but it was an accident. They always put the wrong kind of tape on me. My skin doesn’t like paper tape. So I was scratching my arm and the blankets might have come up and I guess the catheters came out but I didn’t mean to take them out and I certainly wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
She pauses and stares directly at me saying, “Never take a snake into your home. Cut off its head and bury it under a rock.” She then continues. “After she’d been with us a couple of weeks, I had to go to the coast. I asked my husband if he wanted to come, but he said he needed to stay at home and supervise the wood cutting so we’d have wood for the winter. I asked my son if he wanted to come, and he said he had to work on wood cutting as well. So I went down to the coast on my own. “While I was gone, my husband was sleeping on the couch in the living room because we had ripped up the carpet in the bedroom. One night she came to him after he’d been drinking and had taken some pain pills, naked, while he was on the couch and he was too out of it to know what was going on so they had sex. I think she raped him. My son found out about it and tried to attack her but he found my husband, his father. He beat him up instead and killed him. So my husband is dead, and my son is in jail because of this woman.
She pauses and stares directly at me saying, “Never take a snake into your home. Cut off its head and bury it under a rock.”
Okay, that’s plausible. “Do you want to talk about what happened to your dog, I heard you lost her yesterday and I’m so sorry.” I asked next. “The woman across the valley poisoned my dog. I know it. There are at least six dogs on the property and none of the others are suffering at all. I know that bitch is responsible.” “It sounds like you know this woman and there’s a history there. Do you want to talk about it?” Here it comes… “Ten years ago my son started dating this girl. She came to us one day saying that he was physically abusing her so we took her into our house to live with us.”
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COMMON SENSE MAY/JUNE 2023
“Several years ago I had to go to the hospital for a prolonged time over two and a half months. As a result of this I was going to lose my house because of hospital bills so I signed my property over to one of my nephews. He has since moved several families in and there are various shacks and RVs of some very undesirable people on the property now. I’ve tried to get them to leave but my nephew says it’s not my property so I can’t make anyone go. “Between all of these people there are quite a few dogs. My beloved German Shepherd was the only dog that suddenly started experiencing symptoms of poisoning and died yesterday. I’m absolutely sure this woman is responsible and I’d like to take a gun to her head and kill her.” >>