Recently I had an older patient who reminded me a little of her. Although my grandmother was sweeter, I could tell this lady was lonely. She was on the call button every 2 minutes to tell the nurse that she was dying.

When I went to see her, she looked at me and said, “I’m dying.” I looked her in the eye and said, “Not tonight.”

After a DuoNeb and some pain meds, she was feeling much better. As it happened, it was her birthday. As our tech wheeled her out to her daughter, we all sang “Happy Birthday.” I think that was better medicine than the morphine.

Another lonely lady visits us often. She’s kinda crazy. I’m always sweet to her, but the last time she was discharged from the hospital, she asked the EMS crew how long she had to wait to call them to bring her back.

One day she came in complaining of shortness of breath (she always has this, she has COPD and is on home oxygen). Some ding-dong got a D-dimer on her, and, of course, it was elevated, so we were waiting on a V-Q scan. This is when I took over.

After the V-Q scan, she came back to the ED and started pitching a fit about her glasses. “Where are my glasses? Somebody stole my glasses!” She started to blame the nurse, and then proceeded to accuse the nuclear med tech of stealing her glasses. I turned to the tech and said, “Nobody stole her glasses; she’s probably hiding them down her pants!” About 20 minutes later, the tech emerged from my patient’s room with a smirk on her face. “I found her glasses.” “You did?” I replied. “Where were they?”

“They were in her panties.”

Holy cow, I was totally kidding when I said that. Maybe I do have telepathy. “What did she say when you found them?” I asked our tech.

“She just grinned and shrugged her shoulders.” Seriously.

The other type of older patient is just like my gambling-loving Grandma (my father’s mother).

A little about my Gram: She’s 87, has horrible CHF from a crappy aortic valve that’s probably about to fail, loves really bad movies like ‘Snow Dogs’ and really good ones with John Wayne. She also is known for the saying, “I’m still kickin’.”

My Gram did NOT grow up the daughter of a physician. She was the youngest daughter, but she worked most of her life. She worked the night shift at Charity Hospital in the department that cleaned all the instruments, needles, and stuff they used to reuse. After that, she was a telephone operator.