Retail Pharmacy, So To Speak

A long, long time ago, in an ER very far away, I was a night shift ER nurse.

Surprise!

So, TINS, TIWFDASL, well, uh, not so much. I and the other nurses were capitalizing upon a slow moment and gabbing away at the nursing station, when one of our security officers ran in (literally!) and announced that “We got a shooting in the driveway!”

Having heard no loud noises, I was puzzled, but, these officers were not prone to overstatement, so I asked a couple of the other nurses to grab a cart, I grabbed some gloves, and off we went to the ambulance entrance.

Now, by way of background, this was in the early days of the crack cocaine epidemic (although, how one contracted “crack cocaine” from another person without active, willful action on one’s own part is unclear to me). A couple of blocks away was what might be considered to be an open air drug market. Folks (commonly suburbanites) would drive up, engage a soul in conversation and arrange a transaction, another confederate would be summoned and the exchange would take place, money from the buyer, drugs from the vendor.

We were told that in this particular transaction, the named patient, seated in the back seat of this two door vehicle, appeared to believe that he was the designated quality control inspector. Indeed, the tale appeared to paint this fellow as believing that he ought to remonstrate with the vendor regarding the unsatisfactory nature of the product that had been delivered.

As the History Of Present Illness unraveled, the vendor did not seem to have fully committed to a “Zero Product Defect”, nor a “Every Customer Fully Satisfied, Every-time” merchandising philosophy, as, when the shootee indicated that he, the shootee, intended to enforce his product quality complaint by with holding payment, he, the vendor, is reported to have produced a handgun, and shot the shootee.

Bad times ensued. The driver, unsurprisingly, panicked, and sped away. A few blocks later, he, the driver, noticed our bright “Emergency” sign, and pulled in, bellowing an incomprehensible narrative.

So, security cleared the car of the terrorized goslings, and I (and security, and my nursing partners) tried to extricate Mr. Beenshot’s inert form out of the rear seat of a coupe, indeed, a compact coupe.

It only closely resembled a cluster fuck. For a while.

We maneuvered Mr. Beenshot into our code room, and commenced to resuscitating. Before things had progressed very far, our doc had determined that this guy had a “STAT!” transfer in his very near future, and so the nursing supervisor, who had come at a run upon our paging a Code Blue overhead, peeled off to arrange with our transfer ambulance service that they produce a crew and truck RFQ (Right F*%king Quick), and then phoned TBTCIDC to provide them a heads up.

We eventually got him stabilized (kind of, sort of), and the physician had a detailed chat with TBTCIDC senior physician. Off Mr. Beenshot went, and we sought out the entourage, intending to elicit more history, more circumstances leading up to the shooting, more pretty nearly anything, so we could provide that information to TBTCIDC, as well as, well, notify next of kin.

Alas, the posse had unassed our waiting room sometime while we were distracted, trying to save the life of their friend, I mean, co conspirator.

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