Still, there was that one patient everyone seemed to avoid, a man in his 20s with back pain. I watched as the medical student picked up his chart, then placed it back on the rack. Nurses, too, weren't going to his room. Finally, I assigned a team to care for him.
"We drew the short straw here," I overheard the nurse say.
The resident sighed. "I already ordered labs and an X-ray. It's going to take too long to examine him, so let's just get this started."
What was different about this patient? Was it a dangerous, contagious disease? A mental health problem marked by a violent streak? A history of weekly drunken visits to the ER?
No. All he had was a wheelchair.
He had been in a car accident five years before and was paralyzed from the waist down. He told me that he was used to waiting, to being the patient that providers avoided. His back pain was from a kidney infection, and it turned out that all he needed was an antibiotic.