Friday, April 6, 2012

Regarding Your Recent Hospitalization

You came into our emergency room at 3:30 AM on February 12th. You stated to our front desk attendant that you were having difficulty seeing, hearing, smelling, or tasting anything. You also stated that you were having problems with your breathing and balance. After you filled out your preliminary forms and provided the proper identification, you were asked to sit in the waiting area.

We at this hospital pride ourselves on our commitment to giving the best care possible to our patients. It is not our intention to have anyone wait for longer than is necessary, especially in an emergency situation. The actions you then took on the morning of February 12th, while not criminal in nature, caused a disturbance in our emergency room that we are required by law to report to both the local police station and your primary care physician.

When our attendant advised you that you would have to wait, you (in her words) "called me a dirty ringmaster in a circus of pain" and continued to harass her until our security officer intervened. Your tone was relatively civil, but we still find your use of language to be objectionable; there were several children present in the waiting area.

Once you saw Dr. Repal, our doctor on call on the morning in question, the first thing he noticed about you was that you had a black bag duct-taped over your entire head and part of your neck. He attempted to explain to you that this bag might be the cause of your symptoms, and suggested that he carefully remove the bag to alleviate you of any further discomfort. What followed marks the second time our staff found you to be combative in nature, as you refused to remove the bag from your head. Instead you insisted that the bag was not causing the problems you were complaining of, and that in fact you had been suffering from all the ailments in question before the time the bag was ever on your head. When Dr. Repal asked you how the bag came to be on your head in the first place, you admitted you had put it on yourself over ten years ago.

You went on to explain that you needed the bag to remain on your head to survive, as it was the only thing you had found that would satisfactorily manage the symptoms that brought you to our hospital. You also explained that you had tried taking the bag off before, but you immediately suffered headaches. Dr. Repal attributed this to an increased sensitivity to light and sound, which would pass in a relatively short amount of time. You argued vehemently against his theory, stating that you had kept the bag off of your head for an entire day at one point in 2007 and had not been able to stand the way you felt, so you put it back on, this time securing it with duct tape so it would not fall off accidentally.

We recommended at this juncture that you speak with one of our resident mental health experts. You then stormed out of our hospital, were rude to several of our attendants on the way out, and made a short speech to the patients in the waiting area, which was muffled and hard to understand but was clear to contain numerous baseless accusations regarding the quality of health care provided by this hospital.

We would ask that should you visit our facility again, you would please be mindful of the mental health of the people around you, and please also return the hospital gown you were wearing when you left last time. We have mailed your clothes to the address you provided.  




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