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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

This Says It All About North Dakota

Sent to me by Greg, link here, the story about the construction worker whose skull/brain was impaled with a 3.25 inch nail:
"Leave it in, it'll rust, and you'll die of infection. Pull it out and you'll bleed to death."

"Or you can go to St Paul."

"So we took the St Paul option, Luptak said. "Never got any painkiller -- didn't need it, didn't feel anything."
Something tells me the HMO would not have paid for the painkiller anyway.

5 comments:

  1. I'm the "Greg" who emailed this in. First off, if you find a good story email it to Bruce. If you want to stay anon say so. Bruce will respect.

    In the early 1970's I worked for the U of MN hospital and we would get a lot of "Dakota" patients. Same now for the very complicated medical issues. Back then it was mostly "farm accident" stuff. To the degree it is practical thus should be local but the Twin Cities and Rochester, the Mayo Clinic have a lot of expertise.

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    1. I have a physician friend who years ago used to "moonlight" in the local emergency rooms in North Dakota. Activity was generally pretty quiet, especially late in to the night.

      The "thing" he worried about most was getting a phone call saying a "farmer" was on his way in. Generally, farmers did not go into the emergency room unless they had lost a limb in a heavy equipment accident. A non-painful 3.25 inch in the skull could probably wait until Monday if it occurred on Friday night.

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  2. Medical liability has changed for better or worse.

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  3. Just a trivia point but the term "moonlighting" came from using explosives to open wells up before we had fracking. The person who patented the process wanted to collect royalties. Pleople whould "blow wells" "by the light of the moon" in the middle of the night.

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    1. Isn't that interesting? Very interesting -- great for cocktail chatter.

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