Sir, That's not a Toilet

As a senior resident there's not much an intern can say to you to get you running. They are interns, after all, and to an intern patients are very scary (and woe be unto them if they miss something obvious). And so, usually, a pat on the hand and a quick look at the patient is all that is needed to dispense with the problem. However, the following statement did get me running, "Doc, the patient in 12 is taking a crap in the Ortho bucket."

Now we were old school in residency... We did our own splinting and we did it with plaster and we used these wax-paper buckets to get the plaster nice and ready to apply (and the buckets were just a bit smaller than your average bucket so I had to see it).

In fact, the patient in question was squatting over an Ortho bucket, and, in fact, the room stank like poverty, but the patient was not, thank all that is good, taking a crap in the bucket. He was merely expressing a stream of puss from his perianal abscess into the bucket. It was nice of him to try to keep it from going all over the floor. It was also nice of him because it meant that I didn't have to stick a knife into the thing in the ER and we could admit him for definitive excision by an unlucky surgeon. Ah, memories.