Fear hospitals.

This morning, I spent twenty minutes of my life trying to answer a nurse's question. The question was this: "I can see clearly in front of me that this test on this patient was cancelled. Why are you running it?"

Now, for those not intimately familiar with the computer systems I work with at the hospital, it seems like a reasonable question. If a test gets cancelled, it shouldn't be run. And it wasn't. We'd taken care of it. If we hadn't taken care of it, she wouldn't know it had been cancelled. She put the order in wrong, so we had to fix it. One of the ways we fix wrong orders is to cancel them, and then put them in the machine again properly.

So effectively, her only evidence that we would be running the test was a big, honkin' message on her very own computer screen saying that we WEREN'T running the test. The question, translated, was "I see you guys aren't running this test. Why are you running it?"

I think I broke a few cranial blood vessels smacking my head against my desk.

And this isn't an isolated incident. I once almost killed someone because their nurse ordered a test off of an expired blood sample. Had it not gone through, it would have yielded a wrong result, leading to an automatic and unnecessary blood infusion, leading to a dead patient. I couldn't have known any better; I had only been working there a couple of months, and have never claimed any real knowledge of medicine. It was only because of an intelligent and diligent coworker of mine that this patient continues to, you know, not be dead. Is it any wonder I don't ever want to be hospitalized? I mean ever. If anybody ever sees me get shot, and lie down, bleeding to death, just let me be. Whatever my fate over the next few minutes, I can almost guarantee: a hospital would be the worst possible one.