Dr. Cranquis' Mumbled Gripes

I'm an American physician who works in an Urgent Care clinic. I see lots of stupid or funny things that people do with-and-to their health. I cope by mumbling under my breath (and then posting about it on this pseudonymous blog). Thought you might be interested.

(Disclaimer: Questions related to medical topics will be answered to the best of Dr. Cranquis' (and Google's) knowledge, but the internet-delivered wisdom on this blog CAN NOT AND SHOULD NOT SUBSTITUTE for your Real-Life Doctor's personal attention + examination, and your own common sense too! If you think you're having a medical emergency, hang up and go email 911. The author of this blog takes no responsibility for any medical, relationship, scholastic, financial, or other decisions you may make based on information found in this blog.)

And since people seem to be a bit confused about this: any "real-sounding" patients names are just horrible puns, and not HIPAA violations.

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Dr. Cranquis, there’s a woman on the phone and she wants to let us know that she is having a terrible headache and her doctor told her by phone to go to the ER yesterday, but she wants to come to the Urgent Care instead because we’re closer and she doesn’t want to drive that far, because of her headache you see, but she is pretty sure that she’ll end up needing to go to the ER ANYWAYS because of how bad her headache is, so she wants us to call for an ambulance to come and wait in the parking lot while you check her out to see if she needs to go to the ER or not. She’ll be here in 20 or 30 minutes.

My nurse, who sometimes talks in long headache-inducing sentences when patients are behaving badly.

(Can you imagine the phone call if I had actually called the ambulance ahead of time? “Yes, er, hi. Dr. Cranquis here. So… would you mind hanging out in our parking lot for 30 minutes or so? Oh, no reason…”)