ATLANTIC CITY, NJ – Rollda-Dice Hospital’s ED now sees an extra fifty patients a day since adding an allergy-sniffing dog to its staff.
Danny the Dilaudid Dog is a handsome three-year-old golden retriever approved by the FDA for detection of phony or mistaken allergies to pain medications. He can tell when someone has a real allergy to ibuprofen, Tylenol, oxycodone, hydrocodone, or tramadol. And he herds those who actually need Dilaudid into one corner of the waiting room.
Many patients with a pain level of 10 out of 10 or higher believe they are allergic to all the meds listed above. According to Danny, most of them are wrong.
It was discovered recently that a person with an actual allergy to one or more pain meds gives off a subtle but detectable odor that a well-trained dog can detect, just like dogs zero in on very small quantities of explosives or cocaine.
B.S. Hunter, who trains animals for movie studios, decided to expand his business to include emergency medicine after he had to seek medical attention for a brown recluse spider bite.
“I was on location and my favorite brown recluse, Jimmy, bit me on the nose. He must’ve been upset about all the takes the director was putting him through,” Hunter told GomerBlog.
“The director wanted bite after bite after bite. Some Hollywood types are perfectionists. So, they took me to a hospital and the people waiting in the ER were divided into two groups. There were signs that asked everyone allergic to all pain meds except Dilaudid to sit in one big section, and all others to sit on the other side of the room. Almost everyone seemed to think they belonged in the first group.”
That’s when Hunter hit upon the idea of training dogs to sniff out real drug allergies. He hired a team of allergists to help find people with authentic allergies to various pain meds. That wasn’t easy.
Hunter says, “We were able to locate twenty-six such people who were willing to help for a small fee.”
More than six hundred hospitals are on the waiting list for dogs like Danny the Dilaudid Dog. But there has been a strong backlash from the Dilaudid-disqualified.
“This is un-American,” claimed Al Wazehigh, patient familiar to the staff of an Atlantic City ED. “The Constitution protects my right to Dilaudid.”
Neverkidd enjoys writing for GomerBlog because that lets him continue this unbroken record of never kidding. He is the author of “True Tales from a Physician Assistant,” which he wrote using a random pen name, available on Amazon here.
