I'm writing a character who's a nurse, and he and his friends end up getting trapped in an airport due to a blizzard, so they start sharing stories to pass the time... would you mind sharing some wacky/funny/gross/interesting nursing stories? Thank you in advance!
Nurblr, Medblr, Rescublr, please please please add!!!
Had a patient going through the ceiling tiles above the toilet to “see what was up there” and found a box of fentanyl patches, a bottle of percocet, and a bottle of colace that dated back to 2003.
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Had an illiterate heroin addict steal a vial of insulin and a needle and inject himself with what was probably hundreds of units of insulin, thinking it was fentanyl. He came really close to coding, but lived.
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Found a cockroach in the ice machine. When I reported it, the woman I talked to was like “yup, uh huh, that’s where they like to live, we’ll call the guy” and then proceeded to tell me the story about how they used to have this guy whose job it was to literally just de-roachify the ice machines on a monthly basis. But they’d laid him off due to budget cuts so now they only called them when people actually saw cockroaches coming out of them. Apparently he’s so good at the specific art of ice-machine de-roachification he now works on call for all the hospitals in the area.
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I had a very confused patient who had pulled out her catheter and IVs multiple times. MD would not order restraints or sedation. Posey stuff did nothing to keep her reliably distracted.
Fortunately, she used to be a seamstress, so I took a bunch of towels from the linen cart and unfolded them into a heap, put them on her bed, and told her she had to work for her stay. She started folding. Every once and a while I would take the folded towels to the other end of the room, mess them up, and bring them back. She’d look at me with abject exasperation and disgust, but keep right on folding.
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Had this little old lady on our unit for literal months at a time. A+Ox1, had no clue what was going on but was so, so sweet, everyone loved her. But her daughter was the kind of person who would brag to anyone who would listen about how much she was helping the nursing staff. She would make you stand in the room while she cleaned her mother up. Wouldn’t let you do it, but you needed to be there to watch her do it so you UNDERSTOOD how much she had to do because of how useless the nursing staff was.
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Had an immobile, incontinent, 300lb guy who probably hadn’t pooped in a week and a half get the quickly escalating colace/MoM/prune juice/miralax/mag citrate/golytely treatment. When it finally hit him, all at once, poop literally flowed off the side of the bed. We were scooping it out with urinal bottles just to get enough of it out of the way to wipe him up (this is a story just about any nurse will have to some degree).
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The lady who would skype call her sister every time you were in the room so she could loudly critique everything you did from three states over.
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The Sad One (there are a lot of these in hospital life, but this is the one I think would work in a story):
Had a patient admitted early in the day shift (DNR-CCA) who would hit her call light and ask for you to move her blanket two inches to the left, then two inches to the right, and move her water, and move her remote, etc… Like, very clearly just trying to keep someone in the room with her.
The second you would walk out she’d be on the call light again. And if you didn’t answer it right away, she’d start screaming that she was BLEEEEEEEEEDING (there was a tiny bit of blood in her IV), that she was DYYYYYYYYYYYYYING.
And we knew she was scared, we knew she was otherwise alone. We tried really hard to do whatever we could to make her feel safe and cared for. Eventually, though, we couldn’t even look at her when we’d go into the room. Couldn’t talk to her. “Don’t engage!” We joked. We were quickly getting so fed up. We grew to hate her so much.
She died that night. Alone.
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Walked into a (very anticoagulated) patient’s room and there was blood everywhere. The doctors had told him he was going home that day, but had “forgotten” to take his IV out (nurses or aides do that, not doctors), but no need to call them, cause he’d done it himself.
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There was a resident who kept a code going on a John Doe in the lobby long enough for all the medical students to get their first chance at compressions, and try their hands at drilling IOs, and even shocked him when it wasn’t technically useful (the pt was had been in asystole the whole time) because the students needed to see it before they were in a position to actually order that someone be shocked.
Even though it was kind of ethically questionable, it taught a lot of people a lot of very important things that would probably save other lives down the line.
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The time we cathed a solid 2400ml of urine out of this woman’s bladder (normal female bladder capacity is like 300-500).
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Once, this pt walked out of her room, took a squat in front of the nurses station, pooped, and then went right back to her room like nothing had happened.
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This one time when I was still an aide, I put a texas cath on a guy that stood up to him masturbating continuously for 8+ hours in a 4-person, co-ed room (unfortunately, everyone has this story too).
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There are a lot of people who read those going “TAME!!!!” but I have but a lowly 1.5 years experience and do not work in an ED. So please, I beg of you, add your own!!!
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