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33 questionable things people do that emergency room staff are begging them to stop

“To get a pregnancy test.”

By

Mark Wales

By  Mark Wales
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emergency rooms, nurses, Reddit, patients, redditors, doctors, stories, hospital
Photo credit: Canva – Embarrassed woman and a surprised doctor.

Sometimes people can’t help themselves. They engage in behaviors that are certainly not in the best interest of their health, but they do them anyway. And plenty of people seem destined to land themselves in a hospital emergency room.

There are others living lives where not much is happening out of the ordinary. And then they feel compelled to rush to the emergency room, seemingly for nothing. Others, meanwhile, have the weirdest things happen that land them in that very same place.

ER, panic attacks, butt, sick notes, helmets, ambulance, doctor's note, hangovers
The Emergency Department. Photo credit:u00a0Canva

An r/AskReddit thread posed an important question: “To anyone who works at the ER, what is one thing you wish people would STOP coming to the ER for?” These are some of those stories. Important note: This is a thread of people’s opinions. If you believe you need medical attention, seek it immediately. If the visit was unnecessary, you can work out the embarrassment afterward. As one Redditor said, “Never make decisions about your life based on Reddit posts.”

You should know better

Whether it’s adrenaline junkies, basic healthcare mistakes, motorcycles, or drinking too much, there are plenty of ways people can end up in the ER. People who work there wish individuals would handle these situations better:

“I’m just glad and surprised no one has said panic attacks yet. When I first started getting panic attacks, I went to the ER twice because I thought I was dying and didn’t realize what a panic attack actually was at the time.”

“Had a kid come in after falling off her motorized bike, no helmet of course. I kinda got onto them about it. Mom asks ‘What age can they stop wearing a helmet?’ I blurted out ‘until the day you die of old age. I still wear a helmet every day. Brain damage doesn’t care about your age.’ The mother was truly shocked.”

“Sick notes… employers wanting a doctors note/sick note because a staff member called in sick. Depending on time of day and day of week they’ll come to an ER because everything is closed, and they’ll get fired if they don’t provide said note.”

“ER doc: had a mother call for an ambulance because 5 year old had scraped her elbow. Asked why she called the ambulance and was told she was on Medicaid and didn’t have any bandaids at home so needed free ones. I gave her a whole box and told her that was not a good use of the ER or ambulance services.”

kids, splinters, pregnancy test, embarrassing, immunizations, flu season, fever, broken toes
Little girl with a splinter. Photo credit:u00a0Canva

Probably not emergency-room worthy

When it comes to your health, “this is an emergency” might be an unwarranted yet logical conclusion. Sometimes we don’t know exactly what to do, and the emergency room seems like the only answer.

“When they bring all four kids into the er cause they all have cough and sore throat all at once.”

“The sniffles and a cough.”

“My daughter had a blocked, inflamed, and infected gallbladder. We had to wait behind a guy who said he had a runny nose and anxiety.”

“One guy told me when I asked him what brought him to the ER, that he had a hangnail on his toe. I guess I did a bit of a double take and he said, defensively, ‘my feet are important to me.’”

“To get a pregnancy test. Because they don’t want the embarrassment of buying one.”

“Bringing their child to the ER because they have to have immunizations to go to school so let’s get them in the ER at three in the morning.”

“If you take your kid to a hospital during cold and flu season, they’re going to be sick by the time they leave the waiting room even if they weren’t when you arrived.”

“Head lice”

“UNMEDICATED FEVERS. Please, please give your poor kid some Tylenol.”

“you need a medication refilled”

“You had a stomach ache yesterday, but now the symptoms have gone away (why are you here???)”

“Also I have heard patients come in for feeling ‘buzzy,’ ‘weird I don’t know I can’t explain it,’ ‘feeling off.’ Like what the hell does that mean. I end up doing a big work up since it’s so vague and everything comes back normal.”

“my grandson has a splinter in his foot.”

“Broken toes – nothing can be done”


accidents, affordable insurance, men, cannabis, healthcare, caregiver, constipation, drugs
Woman on phone after car accident. Photo credit:u00a0Canva

Unexpected reasons

You’ve probably heard the term “life gets lifey,” or something along those lines. Things happen. We need medical attention, and the ER seems the best place to go. These are some of the more unexpected ways someone can find themselves at the hospital emergency room:

“I was a caregiver and had to take my grandfather to the ER multiple times because he would apparently get super constipated, not say anything then all of a sudden be in a ton of pain and then we would go to the hospital and turn out it was because he hasn’t gone in days but that was because it became impacted, so much more serious.”

“This. My answer is homelessness. With all this wealth and advancement it amazes me society still has this issue and refuses to address it well with meaningful solutions that are available.”

“The worst are the ones who call 911 because they think they’ll get into the ER faster. Sorry, triage exists for a reason lol. Enjoy your 6 hour wait because people are literally dying.”

“I had to go for hiccups once. It was so embarrassing. But I had them for 3 days and I couldn’t sleep. I was losing my mind.”

“I can’t afford insurance. I make too much to qualify for government healthcare but don’t make enough to buy my own. The ER IS my primary doctor.”

“I asked my brother in law this once. He said viagra. Young men, clearly not the target audience for the drug, would take it to try to have a spicier night with a lady friend, then go to the ER when the drug didn’t stop working after four hours.”

“You are supposed to seek treatment for an erection over 4 hours though. There can be permanent damage and it really can be an emergency.”

“Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome. PLEASE JUST STOP SMOKING WEED.”

“I went to the ER for what ended up being a UTI once. I felt so stupid, but as it turns out, my body straight up doesn’t tell me if I have one, and it had gone straight into a kidney infection. I was in absolutely excruciating pain that I had absolutely no idea why I was having, and I figured maybe I was dying at the time.”

Watch this helpful video:

When it comes to our health, it can be challenging to know exactly what the best course of action is. After all, most of us are not medical professionals.

This Redditor shared some helpful advice on what you might expect when visiting an ER: “But understand that if you’re not dying, others may be, and you’ll have a wait. Understand that not all services are available in the ER. Treat patients and staff with basic respect (while advocating for yourself or your family as needed).”

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  • Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes
    Photo credit: LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images – Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving.
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    Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

    Why “bad” English is nothing new.

    Good Partner

    Valerie M. Fridland

    Valerie M. Fridland

    As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

    While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

    Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

    The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

    In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

    From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

    The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

    Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

    While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

    If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.

    And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.

    Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.

    The rise of the grammar sticklers

    Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.

    In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.

    Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

    Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

    Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

    Evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

    Embrace the change

    Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

    But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

    So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

    This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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  • 10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild
    Photo credit: Canva – (L) Kids wrestling in the yard; (R) young children playing chess
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    10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

    The premise was simple but high stakes.

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    It sounds like the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. However, in the mid-2000s, it was a very real and very controversial reality television experiment.

    Footage from the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone is captivating audiences all over again. It offers a fascinating and chaotic look at what happens when you remove parents from the equation.

    The premise was simple but high stakes. Twenty children, aged 11 and 12, were split into two groups by gender. Ten boys and ten girls were placed in separate houses and told to live without adult supervision for five days.

    The Setup

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    The Boys: Instant Chaos

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    The girls’ house looked like a different planet.

    In stark contrast to the mayhem next door, the girls immediately established a functioning society. They organized a cooking roster, with a girl named Sherry preparing their first meal. They baked cakes. They put on a fashion show. They even drew up a scrupulous chores list to ensure the house stayed livable.

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    The documentary was controversial when it aired, with critics questioning the ethics of placing children in unsupervised situations for entertainment. But what made it so enduring, and why footage keeps resurfacing years later, is what it reveals about how kids are socialized long before anyone puts them in a house together. The boys weren’t born anarchists and the girls weren’t born organizers. They arrived at those houses already shaped by years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, what boys do and what girls do. Whether that’s a nature story or a nurture story is the question the documentary keeps asking without quite answering, which is probably why people are still watching and arguing about it nearly two decades later.

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  • 9-year-old girl asks Steph Curry why his shoes aren’t in girls’ sizes. The response was perfect.
    Photo credit: Wikicommons – (L) A young girl's letter to Steph Curry asking about women's shoe sizes; (R) Steph Curry.
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    9-year-old girl asks Steph Curry why his shoes aren’t in girls’ sizes. The response was perfect.

    “… it seems unfair that the shoes are only in the boys,” Riley Morrison wrote, starting a chain reaction of positive change.

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    Adam Albright-Hanna

    Nine-year-old Riley Morrison from Napa, California is a huge basketball fan. She roots for the Golden State Warriors and her favorite player is four-time NBA champion Steph Curry. Morrison loves to play basketball so she went online to pick up a pair of Curry’s Under Armour Curry 5 shoes, but there weren’t any available in the girls’ section of the site.

    But instead of resigning herself to the fact she wouldn’t be able to drive the lane in a sweet pair of Curry 5’s, she wrote a letter to the man himself. Her father posted it on social media:

    “My name is Riley (just like your daughter), I’m 9 years old from Napa, California. I am a big fan of yours. I enjoy going to Warriors games with my dad. I asked my dad to buy me the new Curry 5’s because I’m starting a new basketball season. My dad and I visited the Under Armour website and were disappointed to see that there were no Curry 5’s for sale under the girls section. However, they did have them for sale under the boy’s section, even to customize. I know you support girl athletes because you have two daughters and you host an all girls basketball camp. I hope you can work with Under Armour to change this because girls want to rock the Curry 5’s too.”

    “I wanted to write the letter because it seems unfair that the shoes are only in the boys’ section and not in the girls’ section,” Riley told Teen Vogue. “I wanted to help make things equal for all girls, because girls play basketball, too.”

    The letter got to Curry and he gave an amazing response on X (formerly Twitter).

    Many might be surprised that a megastar like Curry took a nine-year-old’s letter seriously, but he’s long been a vocal supporter of women’s issues.

    That August, Curry wrote an empowering letter that was published in The Player’s Tribune where he discussed closing the gender pay gap, hosting his first all-girls basketball camp, and what he’s learned from raising two daughters.

    In the essay he shared a powerful lesson his mother taught him. “Always stay listening to women to always stay believing in women, and — when it comes to anyone’s expectations for women — to always stay challenging the idea of what’s right,” he wrote.

    Curry clearly practices what he preaches because when a nine-year-old girl spoke up, he was all ears.

    Steph Curry and Under Armour didn’t just fix the girls’ sizing issue, they launched a special edition Curry 6 “United We Win” co-designed by Riley, created a $30K annual scholarship for girls, and shifted to unisex sizing across Curry Brand shoes.

    Since then, Curry has stayed active in promoting gender equity: he’s hosted girls’ camps, added girls to his elite training programs, mentored players like Azzi Fudd, and launched the Curry Family Women’s Athletics Initiative to fund 200+ scholarships at Davidson College.

    Riley and Steph bumped into each other at an event where they caught up and took photos. She is now a high school athlete at Vintage High School in Napa, still playing basketball. And yes, still rocking Currys.

    This article originally appeared seven years ago. It has been updated.

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