Rage....

It seems as though I am on an emotion kick, so I will continue down this path with a call I ran some time ago...

Called out to a nursing home/rehab facility for a possible fracture. When we get there and go upstairs to the patients floor we are greeting by the lovely nursing staff with most of the required paperwork. Thinking this was probably BS I started sifting through the paperwork looking for specific things that would affect my care when I noticed a radiologist report dated that day. It stated that a portable x-ray was taken and that the patient had sustained a transverse fracture of the humerus. The funny thing was that it had a time stamp of when it was received by the nursing home staff. It had been 6 hours since they had received it. Me and my partner made our way down to the patients room and find a thin elderly female lying on the bed. Tears were streaming down her face, her gown was dirty and the TV was playing a re-run on the "snow" channel. Taking a look at the patients arm I noticed it was swollen no less than 4 times the opposite arm. It was also at an obvious 45 degree angle. When asked, the nurse said she didn't know how it happened, the patient was found this way that morning at shift change. The patient couldn't talk, due to a previous CVA, but she could understand her surroundings and what we were telling her. I started seeing red at that point. I went back to the rig and got an IV set-up and the narc box. We gave her some morphine to dull the pain she had been living with for the past 12 hours or so and got her moved. By the time we got to the ED, I was in a rage. We gave our report and told the staff everything we had seen. We wrote reports about it and talked to the supervisor. As far as I know, nothing was ever done about it. No one was ever punished, fired or even talked harshly too. My BP still goes up whenever I think about it.