Amusing Nonsequitur

A patient gets brought in by ambulance for knee pain. The story goes that the patient was at a gas station and finished filling up his truck. He walked inside to pay for his gas and when he turned around to leave, he said that “his leg gave out on him” and he fell to the floor. He was able to stand back up, but he wasn’t able to put a lot of weight on his leg. So he hobbled back to his truck and sat backwards onto the seat, but he wasn’t able to lift his bad leg into the truck. The gas station attendant was watching all of this and ended up calling the ambulance. When the patient arrived, he appeared comfortable. He had no complaints as long as we didn’t try to move his leg. Getting him off the ambulance stretcher and onto the cart was a chore. His leg caused him a lot of pain. The pain seemed to be more localized to his hip than his knee. Just to be safe, we x-rayed both of them. To everyone’s surprise, the patient had a femoral neck fracture. “But doc! It can’t be! All I did was turn around! I didn’t fall onto it. How could I have broken it just by twisting?” I showed him a printout of the x-ray and drew an arrow at the fracture site. “Great. Just GREAT! I have to be at work tonight!” “Sorry, Mr. Dwyer, you’re going to need surgery to fix this. You won’t be able to go to work for at least a few weeks.” He just kept running his fingers through his hair. So we ordered the preoperat...
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Tags: Patient Encounters Source Type: blogs