God is always working to make His children aware of a dream
that remains alive beneath the rubble of every shattered dream,

a new dream that
when realized will release a new song, sung with tears,

till God wipes them away
and we sing with nothing but joy in our hearts

--Larry Crabb


Saturday, February 14, 2009

Memorable moments as a nurse.

In my 12 years of being a nurse I have found myself in many situations that make me say "That did NOT just happen." Here are some examples.
1. I was once urinated on by a deceased man. The funeral director and I were moving him from his hospital bed to a guerney. As we rolled him to his side to place the slider board under him I felt a little trickle down my leg. Hmmm that's weird...what is that? Why is the front of his gown wet? Oh. I always thought that hearing was the last thing to go when someone dies, but now I know it is the kidneys!
2. I once allowed a mental health patient to escape from a locked unit. Oops. Nor did I didn't have any keys on me to get myself out to go after her. As the other nurse rushed past and unlocked the door my patient stripped off her shirt. Nice. She wasn't hard to find...just follow the trail of clothes to, of all places, the pediatric unit! Stark naked and fighting with everything in her, she went back to Behavioral health. I don't remember working there after that.
3. I once completely lost a patient. He was elderly and had brain cancer...very unpredictable. He was in his bed on minute and the next thing I knew...gone!! After a few minutes of intense searching he was found--naked--in front of the fish tank. It still makes me laugh, remembering him standing there in his birthday suit just watching the fish.
4. This didn't happen to me, but to someone I was working with on an ortho floor. An elderly man had just had hip surgery, was gorked on pain meds and had underlying confusion. The nurse went in to give him some pills and offered him water but he didn't want to take them with water, he wanted to take them with the apple juice that was sitting on his bedside table. Can you see where this is going? It wasn't apple juice, it just looked like it. The patient drank the whole dang glass and didn't say a word. How someone could drink their own pee? Don't know.
5. I think that this has happened in some form to about every nurse I know but when it happens, one must still question how. My patient just had a prostate resection. He was set up with bladder irrigation where (for you non-nurses) there is a bag of fluid irrigating fluid into the bladder and a catheter removing it. Occasionally a patient will develop a clot that prevents the drainage catheter from working. I had noticed that the poor mister had a large amount of fluid in and barely anything out...obviously a clot. I get the supplies to fix it but the only thing that I could find was a crappy bulb syringe--not ideal but I've seen it work, so here we go. I squeezed most the fluid in with no problem, pulled back, got some fluid/blood/urine mix out, but no clot, and went to push it back in when the syringe became disconnected and sprayed the mix ALL over myself, him, and the walls. I eventually extracted a huge clot, but have changed my technique a bit!
6. Once a young man's telemetry monitor alarmed V-Tach (often a precurser to a heart attack). I learned that night that these alarms are sometimes sensitive to outside influences. This guy found out, too when his room filled with nurses during what was intended to be a personal moment. That's all I'm sayin'.
7. The Tin Man. A patient was admitted for cardiac reasons after huffing. His inhalation of choice? Silver spray paint. His face was completely discolored from the paint. He was dubbed The Tin Man...even by the docs.

No comments: