Needle in the Neck

Last week we did a neck story. Let’s do another this week.

A man called 911 and said he stabbed his girlfriend. When the medics arrived, there was no man. They found a twenty-five-year-old woman, unresponsive, with a needle, hooked onto a syringe, stuck in her neck.

Medics often find drug paraphernalia when addicts go unconscious after shooting up. In this case, no paraphernalia was found and there didn’t seem to have been anything in the syringe. In route to the ED, the patient suddenly woke up and went crazy in the back of the ambulance.

She was like no woman I have ever seen. She was a body builder who admitted to taking steroids, and she had HUGE muscles. Seriously, she was so totally muscle bound she was unable to put her arms down to her side! She walked like she had a watermelon between her legs. Her breasts were small and tight under her sports bra, and her muscles and tattoos were very visible under her wife-beater T-shirt.

The patient was intoxicated, but that didn’t seem to explain all of her very strange behavior. She claimed to not remember what had happened to her. She reported nearly uncontrollable feelings of rage causing her to feel like punching the wall or another person. She continuously paced around, unable to sit still.

A police officer came in to take a report. His reaction to the situation was a good measure of the strangeness of it all. The patient acted so abnormally and gave such bizarre answers that the officer became frustrated and gave up trying to understand what she was saying. He left, telling us to call him back if she began making more sense.

The patient’s very unusual, androgynous appearance added to the effect of her bizarre behavior. She was clearly a woman. But, she was so masculine, muscled and tattooed it was hard not to stare at her. She looked like a freak and acted like one, too. It made me wonder how much her craziness was caused by acute intoxication, underlying mental illness, or by the steroids she was taking.