Nope. Despite my best efforts, it just hasn't happened yet. Because it seems that somehow people keep getting dumber.
A 25-year old man was brought to me in the middle of the afternoon having wrapped his car around a tree. The first thing the medics told us through the patient's howls of pain was that the guy had been clean from drugs for a while, but he just shot up some heroin that day. The second thing was slightly less surprising -
He had also been drinking. A lot. On a weekday afternoon.
Shocking.
"Fucking hell, doc! My knee! God damn it, my knee!"
I told him we'd give him morphine while we did our evaluation, but he told me he had a preference for hydromorphone (a synthetic narcotic about 10 times stronger than morphine). It's never good when they have a narcotic preference. I gave him the morphine anyway (because I'm not about to let some drunken heroin-addicted idiot dictate his own care), but of course it didn't touch his pain. His tolerance to narcotics was approximately that of an obese heroin-addicted hippopotamus.
It turned out he had a very good reason for screaming so much - a badly-broken knee and a fractured sternum (breast bone). So what caused the accident, I wondered.
"Duh, it was the alcohol, Doc!"
Well, yes and no. At 120 kph (75 mph) he reached down for his cigarettes which had fallen onto the passenger-side floor, and the tree must have jumped out in front of him while he was looking down.
I already knew that smoking was dangerous and stupid, but drinking, shooting heroin, speeding, and reckless driving is taking it to the next level of stupidity. This is überstupid.
Well, he probably isn't going to live very long with that lifestyle.
ReplyDeleteDude just decided to become a bracelet for a tree.
ReplyDeleteNot living long is an understatement.
There ain't no cure for dumb… there ain't no übercure for überdumb. Oh, and about the pedophile from your last post: the punishment that fits the crime is to never be able to do that again. With life imprisonment, he will be locked in a cell until he dies.
ReplyDeleteSo, doc, what did you do to stop his pain since he had so much tolerance? Just give him more until his pain quit?
ReplyDeleteI'm just glad it was a tree that jumped out on him, rather than a mother with a push-chair, or a bus queue or similar.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't want to sell him life-insurance and that's his own fault but it's unfair that he could equally well take a bunch of innocent people with him.