He looked straight up at the ceiling as they always do when they come in wearing that cervical collar. It must be pretty annoying - I've always thought - being rolled into the trauma room where 20 or more people are in a flurry of activity...and the only thing you can look at are ceiling tiles. Although, as annoying as it must be, I imagine it's a good deal less annoying than the subdural hematoma or shattered pelvis they probably have. This particular 18 year old male on the stretcher didn't appear to have any overtly serious injuries. Given the choice of two trauma patients entering more or less simultaneously, one of which I would have to pick up, I chose him over the 16 year old girl whose face was semi-obliterated. I bent over and began my assessment.

"Do you have any allergies."
"Um, no," he hesitated. "I mean that one time I took penicillin...it was fine. I didn't have any problem. Oh, but I'm allergic to cough medicine."
"You're allergic to cough medicine?" I repeated. "What kind?"
"Or, maybe it's not cough medicine. It's something you take for colds that I'm allergic to."
"Do you know what it's called?"
He gave a long sigh, "Alright fine," he doubled back. "I did have a reaction to penicillin once."
"What kind of reaction?"
"Rash."
"Any allergies to anything else?"
"No."
This was going to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Having covered allergies, I decided to skip right to the 'Event' portion of my 'A-M-P-L-E' history. "Can you tell me what happened?"
"Yeah, I was in the car with my friend. I mean, she's more of a friend of the family. She's not my girlfriend or anything. Well, ok, we had sex once. But that was totally just a onetime thing. And it was like four months ago. We're totally cool right now, except-"
"You were driving and you clearly had an accident," I interrupted. "What happened to bring you in here?"
"Ok well, the police were chasing us. Because it's a stolen car. But i had just borrowed the car from a friend - I didn't know it was stolen. He gave me the k-"
"Dude, stop right there." I put one hand on either side of the bed and positioned my face directly above his so that he could look into my eyes instead of ceiling. "Listen carefully. Focus." I paused. "Things I DON'T care about: whose car you were driving, what color it was, who else was in the car, where you were going or why you were going there. Things I DO care about: how fast you going, the kind of object you hit, how fast it was going, whether or not the car rolled over, whether you were wearing your seatbelt, whether or not there was an airbag, whether or not you lost consciousness and, if so, for how long, and what, if anything, hurts right now. Can you give me that information?"

Honestly, sometimes it's like pulling teeth. Except, he actually did have several badly chipped teeth so that part was soon to come.