10 Things: Truisms in Forensic Healthcare

My friend and colleague Jen and I have been teaching a DV course in Maine (love those Maine folks, BTW, and not just because they feed us lobster). In our discussions today, we touched on a few things that end up being inevitable in the course of our work. This has led us to compile what I will call our list of truisms in forensic healthcare. So without further ado:

1. The more obscene your patient’s language, the more likely you will be asked to read the narrative in court.
2. The more obscene the language to which you must testify, the more likely the jury will be made up of 12 little old ladies that look a lot like your grandmother.
3. The most complex cases never show up in the 1st hour of your call shift.
4. Autoerotic asphyxiation is a boy thing. Find me the literature that says otherwise.
5. The patient with the belt buckle that says, “it won’t lick itself” is the very same patient who has come up with ingenious ways to keep herself safe in the midst of horrible violence. In other words, you simply cannot judge a book by its awesome belt buckle…
6. Whatever your personal triggers are (kids, animals, elderly), those are the cases you will *always* see.
7. The more desperate you are for sleep, the less likely the pager will let you actually have it.
8. The one time you deviate from protocol will be the one time it all goes to shit.
9. Just when you think your team is solid, someone will quit.
10. There’s always someone smarter. Trust me, that’s a good thing.

I’m definitely interested–what are some of your truisms?