50mg of Benadryl And Some Morphine

I just moved to a new station. My engineer bid out to the same station as me so we're still together. So while my captain, engineer and I were working out we talked about "frequent flyers" that are in the area. I've met a couple of them already from the overtime shifts that I've worked. My engineer mentions one that used to be in the area a while back but my captain says they haven't run on her in a long time.

Fast forward to lunch time. The tones go off and we are dispatched to a familiar address (at least to the rest of my crew). At my old station I would get dirty looks when I would say we hadn't had a certain type of call in a while. We would undoubtedly get on that shift. Full arrests, traffic accidents, wires down, fires...it didn't matter. Every once in a while it would strike me that we hadn't had a, fill in the nature of the call here, in a while. My crew would groan and say more or less, "SHUT UP." Well this time my engineer had done it. We were headed to the frequent flyer that my engineer had just told me about.

 When we arrived on scene we found a 28 year old female complaining of severe abdominal pain. When asked about her medical history she rattled off a list. She then informed me that she would like "50mg of Benadryl for her anxiety and some Morphine." Going into the call I was forewarned that she was a drug seeker. Even if I hadn't been, she asked for Morphine. Anyone that asks me for Morphine automatically is put into the category of drug seeker and I refuse. At that point my thorough assessment will determine if you really are in pain or just full of sh*t. I am very aggressive about pain management. This stems from me getting yelled at by my preceptor years ago when I wasn't going to give Morphine to a guy before I moved him.

I asked my patient to rate her pain on a scale of 1-10 if a 10 was the most pain she had ever been in. This is a funny thing that goes on in the medical profession. We always ask the patient to rate the pain. I generally don't care what they say their pain level is, their body language always tells me what I need to know. So why do we ask? I digress. My patient said it was a 10!" So I asked her if this was the single most painful event of her life. She looked at me as if I were stupid and said no. So I tried to explain further. Think of the most pain you have ever been in, that is a 10. How is this pain compared to that? "It's a 10" she said again still with that look of your an idiot plastered on her face. Really not the best tactic if you're trying to get some pain meds. At this point I gave up. She obviously isn't in much pain, if any at all. And she's been in the EMS world enough to know what we ask and how she can get drugs (at least from a new medic).

Needless to say, she got nothing from us, nothing from AMR and I'm willing to bet, nothing from the ER. I'm sure I'll be seeing her again.