I have similar conversations with student nurses when they come to psychiatry about how to (informally) calculate risk when making decisions like how close to stand to someone or whether or not you can go into a patient’s room alone. My one-liner is “don’t be scared, never be stupid.”
First of all, we’ve got a bunch of highly unpredictable people, but 7-11 often has a similar quantity, and at least on the psych unit you can be around 99.9% that they don’t have a gun or even a knife. They might not be kittens, but you don’t have to treat them like rabid bears, either. Well. Most of them anyway, and I’d tell you if we had one at that time.
It also helps when you’re dealing with a high violence patient to take account of all their strengths and weaknesses. Back when I was a sitter I had a patient who was delirious from low oxygen but kept trying to clock me every time I tried to get the O2 cannula back on, but also was too weak from the low oxygen to even sit up. So I just backed off to the foot of the bed and phoned the assigned nurse and just explained what was up and that I needed a second set of hands (to hold his until we got the O2 back up enough for him to listen to reason). She walked right past me and almost got decked and the conversation went more or less:
“oh shit, he’s really aggressive”
“yeah, that’s what I said”
“you sounded so calm though!”
“…well he can’t get me over here!”
I had a similar conversation much later in my career about a patient who was trying to break my fingers but lacked the strength to even do that. When the other nurse expressed concern that he was trying to hurt me all I could think to say in that moment was,“…he’s not very good at it.”
It’s the same when you’ve got a super violent patient in ambulatories. They’ll be ready to beat the shit out of you but if their feet are tied together by a 6 inch strap you can just walk away from that ass-kicking at a leisurely pace, that’s the point of the restraints. Just make sure they’re on right and you won’t have any problems.
Also statistically speaking people with mental illness are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, but that’s a whole different discussion.
Similarly, there are a lot of really lazy bad maps out there that are trying to make some point about a statistic, but are really just population density maps. Give your up votes to the person that links the appropriate xkcd.
I like to say, “Stastically you’re much more likely to die in a car accident on the way to the beach than be attacked by a shark once there.”
So people are less afraid of sharks and more afraid of each other, like it should be.
Maybe, but if we rode on sharks to get around I’m sure the statistic would be different.
“Who here plans on driving their car today? Show of hands!” … “I recommend getting to know these people, because you are far more likely to die in an car accident caused by a stranger than by someone you know. But also don’t upset them, as you are far more likely to be murdered by someone you know rather than a stranger.”
“Mr Tourguide, aren’t you supposed to talk about sharks?”
And I heard you’ll more likely die on your way to collect your win than actually win the lottery.
And I heard home is a very dangerous place, cos lots of people die because of it…or at it?
That’s something that always gets me with certain safety recalls.
Like the Samsung Note 7’s second recall. Something like 1 out of 2 million phones caught fire. It just happened to do it on an airplane and got the phones banned by the FAA. Nobody was injured by the phones catching fire.
How many people died in car wrecks going to the store to swap out their phones?
driving is an apt choice to compare because it’s fucking disgusting how many people it kills every day and no one seems to give a flying fuck about it.
society is constantly actively choosing to let people die in horrible crashes simply because it is convenient.
How many of those people were only going to swap their phone though? How many would have been driving anyway. How many would have been killed doing something else because they weren’t going to swap out their phone…
While an interesting thought, there’s no way to know an alternate timeline of events.
Cows are smarter than they look. Long ago I worked in a dairy operation and they would do things to fuck with you… like if you weren’t super careful in a milking stall they’d casually lean to one side (“oopsie! my bad”) to squish you. Or let the poop rip at just the right moment.
I don’t blame them one bit.
