Never Mind HIPPA

Today was my first day volunteering in the ER, making follow-up phone calls to discharged patients. My job is to look at their charts, call them up and ask them how they're doing. I have to check each patient's chief complaint since there's certain follow-up phone calls I'm not allowed to make (ex: anything pertaining to suicide, social services, etc). Some complaints are fairly simple, such as "muscle spasms," others more descriptive, and some are just plain interesting. In compliance with HIPPA, I cannot divulge the patient's name (not that I even remember it myself), but I have officially declared him/her as my favorite chief complaint of the day: "Hamburger meat stuck in throat."

Go ahead and find this amusing, because he/she is "doing fine."