Ah, oh, wah, wee, oh.........

The other day we had a lady patient for varicose vein scan. Ok, before we start the story-telling part, let's do some homework. Oh, she wasn't my patient either.

Varicose veins are veins that have become enlarged and tortuous and it normally occurs to the veins in the legs. The signs and symptoms are,

• Aching
• Appearance of spider veins
• Ankle swelling.
• A brownish-blue shiny skin discoloration
• Redness, dryness, and itchiness of areas of skin
• Cramps

(the above highlighted "aching" suppose to be dull ache or uncomfortable ache, instead of pleasurable ache)

As the scan get started, we were all doing our own scans as usual. Suddenly, we heard a soft screaming voice"Ahhhh..........Ohhhhh.......Ouchhhhhh.........Hahhhhhhh.........oh dear, why is it this painful? oh dear, oh my....." I was thinking, " What the heck? No one with varicose vein had screamed like that before? Was varicose vein suppose to be that painful? (or rather, pleasurable?)" I was too curious that I immediately abandoned my observation job and ran casually into the cubicle to see what exactly was happening. To my surprise, the lady was painfully crying over her varicose veins! Oh the voice was not made on purpose, she was really in pain and coincidentally, she has the kind of soft spoken voice that made us all misunderstand.

The soft screaming was going on for the next 20 minutes, throughout the whole scan. And we could see the awkwardness expressions of all the other male patients in our lab. And we all pretended like nothing had happening.

Appropriate Behaviour

Today, we had a patient with very inappropriate attitude. He was there for varicose vein scan. He came in wheel chair. I think he was mentally unstable as he kept talking to himself and kept apologizing.

The moment I saw him, I noticed something was different. Hmm....Oh, his left hand! His left hand was inside his pants! He was rubbing or scratching his private part with his left hand. I accidentally saw it and quickly turned away my head. I thought i was the only one noticed thus I didn't say anything. I quickly go and check if he was my patient. I was very relieved when I didn't see my name appeared in his request form.

Slowly, everyone in the lab started to notice the inappropriate attitude. When it was his turn to be scanned, we overheard him kept apologizing to the sonographer, "Sorry mixi (mixi stands for nurse among Chinese), sorry mixi, please save me, please save me," before a long moment of silence took place. At the end of the day, we only realized that whenever he wanted put his hand into the pants, the sonographer moderately hit his hand with a ruler!

Oh FYI, the ruler was already there for a reason. Every cubicle has a ruler for us to measure distant of occlussion or severe stenosis from groin/knee/arm crease, etc. And NO, the ruler was not there for the hitting purposes.