Tell me

As the duty anaesthetist in the hospital last night, part of my purview was helping to manage any out-of-hours pain problems amongst hospital inpatients.
I got a call around 7pm about one such patient who was struggling with severe pain that the ward staff just couldn’t get on top of. I sent one of my juniors up to find out what the story was and see if we could help. She found the man in one of those four bed cubicles and the poor chap was in agony. In order to sort him out she needed to get a brief history, which is basically getting him to tell his story, with some pertinent guiding questions when needed. Half way through the interview, a voice piped up from behind the curtain. It was the patient in the next bed. “Can you keep it down please?? I can’t hear myself talking on the phone.”
To her credit, the registrar kept her cool (the way she tells it) and explained that she was a doctor, and she was there to help a patient, and no, it wasn’t possible for her to shut up or go away.
The response was a loud “Harrumph!” with the following designed-to-be-overheard passive-aggressive conversation: “She says she’s a doctor! But she’s still being unnecessarily loud…”