As an ER nurse, what is the funniest reason for visit you have come across?

A young girl around age 20 waited 8 hrs in a busy ER because her boyfriend told her her privates smelled "funny" Not a true emergency by any means.

I'm not so sure I'd consider it funny per se, but memorable. By the time I finally got a clue as to what the middle-aged gentleman was trying to tell me w/o coming right out with it, I realized that he needed assistance having a couple D size batteries removed from his rectum...

Also, it is important to become in-tune with the ethnicity and culture of the population of patients you will be working with or as a triage nurse, you will be needlessly incorrectly prioritizing some patients over others when it was simply a misunderstanding on your part. As a new, young, naive ER nurse in an inner-city emergency department, I grabbed a stretcher and an orderly and ran out into the ER parking lot to bring in what I thought was a c-r-i-t-i-c-a-l patient. Due to rapidly speaking Jamaican family members whose accents I had yet to become accustomed to, I thought the person whom they said was unconscious in a vehicle in the parking lot had fallen out of a fast-traveling car on the highway. I was sure I was triaging my first multi-trauma patient. ER nurses are not particularly well known for their kindness and understanding of new hires. As it turns out once they brought the patient into the trauma room, cut off all of her clothes, and paged a number of people STAT to the ER, I learned that when someone in this neighborhood "falls out" it doesn't mean they literally fell out of the moving vehicle... In this case, there was no air conditioning, and the person simply fainted from the heat. It took a while before I stopped being teased about that "mis- communication!" What can I say, I was a simple country girl now working in an inner-city environment. I had more to learn than just how to medically care for my patients. Fortunately, the agenda for this forum is medical because I'd hate to share some of the adventures from when the country girl joined a volunteer FD and began driving ambulances and fire trucks!!! :) But don't worry, soon enough you'll be in your 60's like I am now and you'll be in the position of laughing at the younger folks mistakes (Did I say laughing "at", oh, I meant to say laughing "with" them...) If you take yourself too seriously, life is going to be much harder. Learn to laugh at yourself early, you'll be more forgiving of yourself and others.

patient waddled in with an ingrown toenail. He'd been BIBA (brought in by ambulance). I told him to come back to the podiatry clinic tomorrow and also, a patient died of a heart attack because "you used the ambulance as a free taxi service."