Please don't urinate in the sink.

I'm giving up on reason, and trying to understand people. It's just not worth the effort. And yes, for someone who has spent way too many years in school learning logic and the scientific process, that is grounds for crucifixation; at least in effigy.

But you know what? I just got off an elevator where a guy was taking a dump. There is no earthly reason for that, ever. That alone isn't enough to make me abandon all attempts to fit the world around me into a rational paradigm of course, but the encounter I just had in the Emergency Room was the final straw.

Mind you, it's 9 pm at night and I haven't had a chance to pee today, let alone eat, and I'm now sixteen hours into putting out fires on Labor and Delivery. Patient phone calls for percocet, and more percocet, hemorrhage here, angry baby daddy there, crash section, another section, then forceps and a mountain of paperwork to document it all that hasn't yet been started. Fortunately there's still another ten hours left in my day to catch up, and it looks like things are starting to slow down.

Bleep! The bleepin' bleepedy bleep medical student actually said that out loud. That's something you NEVER say on Labor and Delivery. Think it if you must, but saying it condemns you to the exact opposite. Call me superstitious, but my pager went off the exact second I was delivering that clinical pearl to the naive medical student.

Another round of bleeps. It's a Level 3 trauma page from the ER. This means there is a pregnant patient in the ER who just had a severe accident, and they are activating a hospital wide code to get all of the necessary players there. NOW. Uh-oh. Adrenaline kicks in.

I fly down five flights of stairs, past the people shooting up, into the ER, past the patient urinating in the sink, and head straight to trauma bay 3. The patient is surrounded by the entire trauma team- an assortment of general surgeons, emergency room doctors, paramedics, nurses, medical students and nursing students. And now me.

This could be anything from a post mortem cesarean (a pregnant woman dies and her baby needs a cesarean to live, and you do it in the ER or the ICU, or wherever you need to) or it could be a woman who got into an argument at HER BABY SHOWER and tripped when she tried to bitch slap her bff and sat down hard on her rump.
Guess which this is?
Yeah. She was re-enacting it for the surgery chief with her neckbrace on while the RN popped in an IV.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and did a quick ultrasound to make sure the baby was ok. And it was. My heart rate returns to normal.

The excitement's died down a bit, and I admit it. I'm totally curious as to what on earth happened, at a baby shower, to provoke a pregnant woman into such a rage that she jeopardized her health, her baby's life, and activated a state wide trauma alert.
So I ask her.

She looks at me and then explains matter of factly "Bitch got in my FACE. I mean, I ain't talkin' about no little thang, bitch got in my FACE."

Really? That's what led to all this? I must have looked incredulous, or more likely, irritated, because the guy with her chimed in, "Doc can you prescribe an attitude adjustment? Cuz thats what she needs!"

Oh, ok. So where were you when your friend/girlfriend/baby mama/partner was getting into it with her bff? Since you're such an oasis of reason, why didn't you intervene before it came to five squad cars and an ambulance arriving at her BABY SHOWER.

He looked me up and down then said, "Dude be lookin' at my woman!"

Yeah. He was simultaneously beating up some guy who he thought was checking out his pregnant friend/girlfriend/baby mama/partner.