My cell phone wakes me. I recognize the number. Not a good sign.
Dr. Grumpy: "This is Dr. Grumpy."
Mr. Clueless: "Yeah, my wife took her pills at bedtime tonight."
Dr. Grumpy: "She's supposed to."
Mrs. Notas-Clueless (in background): "I told you not to bother him!"
Mr. Clueless: "Well, we normally go to bed at 11:00. So tonight we went to bed at 11:15. Was it still safe to take them?"
Dr. Grumpy: "Yes."
Mrs. Notas-Clueless (in background): "I told you so!"
Dr. Grumpy: "She's been doing this for years. Why are you calling now?"
Mr. Clueless: "I'd never read the bottle before, and just happened to notice it said that when I woke up to pee."
You are saint, with the self-control of monk at a nudist beach. How damned STOOO-pid are these people???
ReplyDeletePAttie, RN
As I have said before, somehow, somewhere, you have a magnet that attracts stupid...that has to be the answer!
ReplyDeleteOn some level that is actually very sweet on behalf of the husband... he was worried... stupid, yes, but still...
ReplyDeleteI can actually see my husband doing something idiotic like this. and thats sad.
ReplyDeleteI get paged at home about things like that often. It gets really old.
ReplyDeleteWhat I hate is that people assume that you should wake up to answer their stupid questions. Save the stupid random stuff for day time. Do you know how many times our emergency hospital gets calls like, "Do boy dogs have nipples?" at three AM? So many that it is a running joke. One of my favorites: "I got home from the club at 3 AM and my dog was sleeping." Ok, join him.
ReplyDeleteMy husband would do something like that. So sweet, and yet so annoying...
ReplyDeleteWhy do you give your cell phone number out to your patients?! Granted I'm a pharmacist, but I don't want my patients to even have a clue where I live, what my phone number is, etc... I can only imagine the voicemails I'd get... "Hi, uh can you fill my vico-dans and xanaxes and have it ready for me when you open?" No way in hell.
ReplyDeleteNew Grad- They don't have my cell number. After hours the office phone is rolled over to my cell.
ReplyDeleteA lot of docs in my area are doing this now, to save money on answering services.
If the real reason is to save on the answering service, you should try Google Voice.
ReplyDeleteYou can setup rules on what types of calls get forwarded where, use different voicemail greetings depending on who the caller is, and a lot of other stuff that is really helpful.
On a slightly different tangent, as a new mom with a snuffling 6 week old with such tiny notrils that I envisioned the morsel suffocating in its sleep, I waited and watched (and debated) for signs of decreased respirations all evening long about calling the family doc, then at about 11:00 PM when could stand it no more made a call and talked with her directly. She did a lot to allay the fears, and then stated, "Don't wait so long to call, next time. I need my sleep, too." Needless to say, I made it a point to think about the issue at hand to avoid delaying a call to later in the night. (Now, as hospital pharmacist, there is certain amount of passive-aggressivity in 'having' to call an MD at night that's been the very devil to work with during the day--but, tried to avoid that as well, in case the waking in the middle of night might affect the MD's safe practice).
ReplyDeleteWhat I find astounding as that it seems these are older people calling you at all times of the night; one would think they'd a lick of sense by then!
Why has natural selection not weeded these people out yet? How have they lived that long with so little common sense?
ReplyDeleteI'll bet you would LOVE to throw your cell phone out the window.
ReplyDeleteMy husband is like this. One of his medications says "take one at the same time daily" He sets the alarm to be sure.
ReplyDeleteI think that an older man having to get up to pee at 2:30 in the morning is Worrisome. Why not express concern, then invite him in to the office for a FULL physical? That will likely be the last time he calls you that late (early)....
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