"No really, I'm fine"

Some people call 9-1-1 for the smallest things and you wonder what on earth they were thinking. And then there are people like this patient.

Our crew responded to a call for a 40 year old male fall victim. En route we received our update stating that it was a fall in the shower. “Great” we all said simultaneously. “Wet, naked patient. Just great.”

We were met at the door by a man who told us the patient was in the bathroom and that he had fallen earlier today and broke his “scapula”. Upon his return from the hospital the two other men living there “made him take a shower because he was so stinky”.
OK.
At this point I was expecting to see a morbidly obese man who was unable to properly care for himself. What I found was a clean, average looking, pleasant enough male standing naked at the bathroom sink with another man pressing a folded towel onto his back (at about his left scapula). He had scrapes and small puncture marks visible on his back but what struck me first was that his left knee was swollen to the size of a softball and he had large red marks running up the back of his thigh. The shower curtain was torn down, the porcelain soap shelf on the tub was shattered and there was a small amount of watery blood in the tub.

I introduced myself to the patient and asked what happened. He told me he had fallen that afternoon and broken his fibula and patella (not scapula) and that he fell again in the hospital while learning to use crutches, not his day I guess. My first thought was why are you standing on your broken leg and why don‘t you have a cast? I asked and he said it didn’t hurt and he was more comfortable standing. He had a brace for his leg but took it off for the shower.
OK.
He said that he slipped in the shower but stated that nothing hurt and that he was fine, he didn’t hit his head or lose consciousness. Good news. I slowly removed the towel on his back to have a look at his injury and as I did so I was pretty sure I could see at least a couple of his ribs sticking right out of his back through his skin. When the towel was completely removed I discovered that he actually had several large shards of shattered porcelain impaled and embedded into his back. I covered the wound with a trauma dressing and informed the patient of what would happen next when the ambulance arrived. This was the exchange that followed:

“Do I have to go to the hospital?”
“Sir, you have shards of porcelain embedded in your back. Yes, you have to go to the hospital.”
“Can’t you just take them out?”
“No, I can’t take them out, and even if I could you would still have to go to the hospital to get your wounds cleaned and sewn up.”

The ambulance arrived and after I showed them his wound they stated that they would be taking him to the nearest trauma center. The patient walked to the gurney on his broken leg and never once complained of pain or discomfort and was apologizing to us for having to respond to the incident.