Warning: Descriptions of major injuries. (Animal-inflicted, no -isms as motivators)
This is another hospital story (first one here.) I defied what people thought was possible more than I defied dominant medical paradigms here, but I guess I did defy expectations of what patients (especially patients who are minors!) are supposed to do at some points after the whole neither dying nor losing limbs when expected to thing.
Short summary of how I wound up in the hospital: There was a mother pig and her piglets. People were trying to move them to a bigger space. I brought some food out to those people. One of them picked up a piglet, who then squealed. I was the human closest to the mother at the time. This mother was an Old Spot pig, full grown, around 800lb. (This is a breed known to kill and eat cows on occasion.) She went after me. Rammed me in the butt, I flew about 8-10 feet and landed on forearms and shins. She bit my right inner thigh, I kicked her in the face with my left leg. This apparently was unexpected, and I was able to scramble to my feet and run into the house, after which we went to the hospital.
So we get to the hospital. My mother has a thing she has to be doing in a different part of the hospital at the time, since she's a doctor, so we split up. I actually make it to the ER before she makes it where she's supposed to be, injured leg and all. This pain tolerance thing comes in handy sometimes. I explained what happened to the person at ER check-in, and I told her I was under 18 and where she could call my mother for permission. She called; mom wasn't there yet. We waited till mom called back so they could actually check me in. She told me to have a seat in the waiting room. I said I'd rather stand, since my butt was bruised, and I stood. Not much in the way of rebellion yet- this is a receptionist, not a doctor, but she is an adult and I am not an adult, so it's not zero either.
It's a small hospital and I get seen pretty fast. They keep trying to give me pain meds, which I refuse. I don't like pain meds. They mess with my ability to think. They keep trying for a few minutes, but then they stop for a bit since I'm not exactly the only patient, it's a small place, and they do have more important things to do than argue with a stubborn 16 year old who is stable and doesn't want a Tylenol while she waits for them to have time to do more.
Once they have time to clean up my wounds (scratches and scrapes, mostly, since I was wearing long shorts that kept the pig from breaking skin and turned it into a crush wound instead,) they saw how badly hurt I was. They also saw how swollen the bite area was- that thing was the size of a cantaloupe sticking out of my thigh, and it would stay that way for about a month. This started them up with the pain meds thing again. (They hadn't seen it before because I showered and put on clean clothes before coming to the hospital, and the clean clothes was a dress.)
As much as patients aren't supposed to challenge doctors and kids aren't supposed to challenge adults, there wasn't actually much they could do- my mother's consent had been that they could do things I said they could do until she got there, and talking me around wasn't going to happen. They could have just given them anyways, I suppose, but they would have been taking the risk that my mother might back me up and not them. She was a doctor and an adult and not a patient, so she actually had status in their eyes. (As it happens, she always backs me up on the pain meds thing, and on just about everything else hospital-related too. I think the only time she didn't was the time I wanted food, real food, and they still thought they might need to operate. That's an actual medical thing, not eating for a certain amount of time before an operation.)
The pain meds were really the big thing here. I was pretty good about other stuff- I disclosed all my allergies, which were kind of annoying to deal with, but disclosing allergies is a thing you're supposed to do. It's also really important, because I'm allergic to the -cillin family. I've had the opportunity to react to two different -cillins because of some older medical fail, but it is now on my paperwork that I am not to have any of them so no one can make that mistake again. I also had to go digging through my entire records because everyone forgot about the second one and I couldn't remember what it was even though I knew there was one. If it hadn't been another -cillin, that could have been bad.
Mom gets there. They try to ask her about pain meds. By this time, they're trying to get me onto heavy-duty prescription stuff. She says they should be asking me. That's actually breaking some paradigm stuff, since parents are supposed to make decisions for their children under 18 and since doctors should have authority over patients. (Remember, she is a doctor, and while she's not an ER doctor, she was doing doctory things at this hospital before. That's why she wasn't there the whole time.)
I'm stuck sitting at the hospital for a while while they figure out what antibiotics to give me. They don't exactly get a lot of people surviving attacks by this breed of pig (by not a lot I mean the records I heard them get from other hospitals were all DOA or bites from near-piglets where the parents weren't around.) They had to talk to several hospitals and an allergy specialist to figure out what to give me. And while they did that, people kept trying to talk me into pain meds. I don't know why they thought I'd give in, but hey, they're not used to stubborn 16 year olds telling them no and getting backed up by their parents. It goes against all the things they've been told about how this works, after all. (They eventually tried "take the prescription and you can fill it if you need it." We wouldn't even do that.)
This is another hospital story (first one here.) I defied what people thought was possible more than I defied dominant medical paradigms here, but I guess I did defy expectations of what patients (especially patients who are minors!) are supposed to do at some points after the whole neither dying nor losing limbs when expected to thing.
Short summary of how I wound up in the hospital: There was a mother pig and her piglets. People were trying to move them to a bigger space. I brought some food out to those people. One of them picked up a piglet, who then squealed. I was the human closest to the mother at the time. This mother was an Old Spot pig, full grown, around 800lb. (This is a breed known to kill and eat cows on occasion.) She went after me. Rammed me in the butt, I flew about 8-10 feet and landed on forearms and shins. She bit my right inner thigh, I kicked her in the face with my left leg. This apparently was unexpected, and I was able to scramble to my feet and run into the house, after which we went to the hospital.
So we get to the hospital. My mother has a thing she has to be doing in a different part of the hospital at the time, since she's a doctor, so we split up. I actually make it to the ER before she makes it where she's supposed to be, injured leg and all. This pain tolerance thing comes in handy sometimes. I explained what happened to the person at ER check-in, and I told her I was under 18 and where she could call my mother for permission. She called; mom wasn't there yet. We waited till mom called back so they could actually check me in. She told me to have a seat in the waiting room. I said I'd rather stand, since my butt was bruised, and I stood. Not much in the way of rebellion yet- this is a receptionist, not a doctor, but she is an adult and I am not an adult, so it's not zero either.
It's a small hospital and I get seen pretty fast. They keep trying to give me pain meds, which I refuse. I don't like pain meds. They mess with my ability to think. They keep trying for a few minutes, but then they stop for a bit since I'm not exactly the only patient, it's a small place, and they do have more important things to do than argue with a stubborn 16 year old who is stable and doesn't want a Tylenol while she waits for them to have time to do more.
Once they have time to clean up my wounds (scratches and scrapes, mostly, since I was wearing long shorts that kept the pig from breaking skin and turned it into a crush wound instead,) they saw how badly hurt I was. They also saw how swollen the bite area was- that thing was the size of a cantaloupe sticking out of my thigh, and it would stay that way for about a month. This started them up with the pain meds thing again. (They hadn't seen it before because I showered and put on clean clothes before coming to the hospital, and the clean clothes was a dress.)
As much as patients aren't supposed to challenge doctors and kids aren't supposed to challenge adults, there wasn't actually much they could do- my mother's consent had been that they could do things I said they could do until she got there, and talking me around wasn't going to happen. They could have just given them anyways, I suppose, but they would have been taking the risk that my mother might back me up and not them. She was a doctor and an adult and not a patient, so she actually had status in their eyes. (As it happens, she always backs me up on the pain meds thing, and on just about everything else hospital-related too. I think the only time she didn't was the time I wanted food, real food, and they still thought they might need to operate. That's an actual medical thing, not eating for a certain amount of time before an operation.)
The pain meds were really the big thing here. I was pretty good about other stuff- I disclosed all my allergies, which were kind of annoying to deal with, but disclosing allergies is a thing you're supposed to do. It's also really important, because I'm allergic to the -cillin family. I've had the opportunity to react to two different -cillins because of some older medical fail, but it is now on my paperwork that I am not to have any of them so no one can make that mistake again. I also had to go digging through my entire records because everyone forgot about the second one and I couldn't remember what it was even though I knew there was one. If it hadn't been another -cillin, that could have been bad.
Mom gets there. They try to ask her about pain meds. By this time, they're trying to get me onto heavy-duty prescription stuff. She says they should be asking me. That's actually breaking some paradigm stuff, since parents are supposed to make decisions for their children under 18 and since doctors should have authority over patients. (Remember, she is a doctor, and while she's not an ER doctor, she was doing doctory things at this hospital before. That's why she wasn't there the whole time.)
I'm stuck sitting at the hospital for a while while they figure out what antibiotics to give me. They don't exactly get a lot of people surviving attacks by this breed of pig (by not a lot I mean the records I heard them get from other hospitals were all DOA or bites from near-piglets where the parents weren't around.) They had to talk to several hospitals and an allergy specialist to figure out what to give me. And while they did that, people kept trying to talk me into pain meds. I don't know why they thought I'd give in, but hey, they're not used to stubborn 16 year olds telling them no and getting backed up by their parents. It goes against all the things they've been told about how this works, after all. (They eventually tried "take the prescription and you can fill it if you need it." We wouldn't even do that.)
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