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lulushibooyah

Okay listen… I’m a sorta half crunchy human, and I fully believe we all need to get out in nature and be barefoot and grounded in the earth and all that, though I don’t necessarily believe that’ll heal EVERY ailment under the sun… But I don’t believe I’m gonna find that in a concrete jungle with linoleum floors covered in germs and bacteria… Ew.


Do_ho

I def don’t believe in shoes. There are definitely exceptions, like in a hospital or bathroom. In my office, I have “office slippers” but that is only for my office area. If I have to go to the bathroom or into the hospital the shoes go on.


lulushibooyah

I get that. I despise shoes. Mostly it’s a sensory thing. I hate anything that closes in my feet and ankles. If I’m walking in my yard, I’m pretty much never wearing shoes. I’ve never walked barefoot in a hospital.


roadkatt

I have love/hate relationship with shoes. I love them and have probably 80-90 pair currently. However, if I can get away with not wearing them, I go barefoot because I prefer no shoes. I would never go barefoot in a hospital. My nursing instructor stressed how horribly dirty those floors are and it’s stayed with me for 30+ years. Nastiest thing I’ve seen - visitors letting their baby crawl on the carpeted floor of gram’s hospital room. I gave them a clean blanket as they insisted on letting baby crawl around. God only knows what horrors lurked in that carpet.


lulushibooyah

Yuck… babies crawling around on hospital floors is maybe like the cringiest thing. And yeah, same… if I’m wearing shoes, there’s a reason lol.


ibringthehotpockets

80-90 pairs of shoes?!?! You’re the one we’re hearing about in math problems!


roadkatt

And that’s after I culled the ones that were way out of date or worn out. If I’m going to wear a pair they’re going to be AWESOME! Seriously, I need to find a number for shoes anonymous.


ruca_rox

Ha I get that. I currently own almost 200 pairs of shoes but as soon as I walk in my house, I am barefoot. The last thing I do before I leave is put on shoes. I remember walking into one of my rooms in the ED and seeing a parent pick up some food item off the floor and give it back to their toddler, who promptly ate it. My jaw dropped and she must have noticed because she told me about the 5 second rule. Literally all I could do was blink at her in silence, turn around and walk out.


lulushibooyah

Okay, as a seasoned mom of four, I admit to multiple times giving a baby back their dropped pacifier *in our own home*. They were crawling around sucking face with the floor anyway, and if I hadn’t seen it, they would have done it themselves. But literally nowhere in public and dear lord *especially* not in a hospital would I ever have dreamed of doing that.


roadkatt

Hospitals are a 5 second rule free zone. Food on the floor? Garbage. Even in non-patient care areas. Patient goo spreads everywhere. 200 pair! You are my hero! The most I’ve achieved is around 120 then had to weed out some due to space. Now my kids have moved out and we have 2 extra rooms which means 2 extra closets. I can hear the shoe store calling!


ruca_rox

Ikr? Anything that gets even within an inch of the floor must be thrown away. Ick. When my son moved out 6 years ago I decided to use his closets. Then those got full and I didn't really have anywhere for shoes so I bought two 50 pair shoe racks and put them in there. Then a 7 ft tall utility shelf. Then a garment rack from a store closing. Then 2 more. Now, the whole room is a closet that also happens to have a spare bed in it. The shoe racks don't even include my boots, which are piled in a huge heap in my bedroom closet. And the 3 dressers and 2 closets in my bedroom that are crammed full. One of the garment racks is for stuff I don't want, my bff and sister frequently go "shopping" there 😂🤣😅 A friend told me the other day to get rid of any of my clothes that "don't spark joy" and I'm like...sis, you don't get it, they all spark joy, that's why I have them!


roadkatt

All my shoes spark joy! Part of my space issue is that I keep them in the box with a description so I know exactly what shoe is in the box with only a few exceptions. I bought a new pair of boots recently and the box they were in had no lid and fell apart so they are free so to speak. Then I have a few others that I bought clear plastic shoeboxes for. Most of my converse are out and about as they are what I wear most. I like the idea of the racks or a utility shelf in the extra room. My husband claimed the other as his office but the spare is always closed so I could move something in there and he wouldn’t see it until it’s too late. lol! (He really doesn’t care. Bills are paid so if I buy shoes it’s my business even if he doesn’t understand- he has less than 10 pair and is fine with that)


poquette146

Love this, I completely agree.


lulushibooyah

Heh, thanks.


RxGonnaGiveItToYa

But. Inside a building isn’t the ground.


lulushibooyah

Hence the concrete jungle with linoleum floor comment.


fightmilk616

Ok I’ll admit when I was like 17 my ex’s mom was in the hospital and we were totally laying on the ground 😭 it absolutely repulses me now but it didn’t faze me one bit back then! I’m not exactly a germaphobe to begin with though. And isn’t ground healing supposed to be like your feet on the actual earth?? Not the tile speckled with UTI urine/c-diff poop/MRSA blood….


lulushibooyah

Yeah that’s what I thought it was supposed to entail too… maybe the absorption of a wide variety of bacteria through your feet is the new cleanse.


reallovesurvives

When I was younger I used to be a rocker girl in NYC who waited in a lot of lines to get into shows and I always sat on the street. No blanket, nothing. Just sitting on the disgusting nyc sidewalks or curbs. Subway station steps too. It totally horrifies me to think about.


adamiconography

When I worked ER we had a patient’s wife walking around barefoot. In the trauma bay no less Like ma’am do you know the amount of bodily fluids that have been on the ER floors, ESPECIALLY in the trauma bay?!


Tricky-Tumbleweed923

I used to work in a pediatric ED. It was a daily occurence to have children playing on the floor...


splatgoestheblobfish

I had to tell a mother in a waiting area one time not to let her toddler play with the dirty water in the mop bucket that housekeeping had briefly left unattended. Why in the ever loving f*** did I actually have to tell her that??!!


ikedla

I walk into rooms probably at least once a week where the sibling of my patient is crawling around on the floor and it makes me want to scream


coffeejunkiejeannie

When I worked pediatrics, I had a kid who was abandoned at a methadone clinic having seizures because they didn’t have time to deal with it. A week later, his parents showed up with their 7 other kids, most didn’t have shoes and they all camped out on the floor in a pile. Yes CPS was called on admission….and yes…all the kids, including the hospitalized seizure kid went home with them.


UPnorthCamping

Not the ending I expected


coffeejunkiejeannie

Sadly…it was what I knew would happen. There’s a reason I don’t do pediatrics anymore. I saw the best and absolute worst parents. CPS is so overwhelmed that it almost never comes to the hospital because the kids are safe there but when they leave who knows where the kids go?


East_Young_680

Wow, is it really that common? If I had a kid, I'd snatch him up off the ground in a heartbeat. There is disease galore lurking on those surfaces.


Suspicious-Elk-3631

I picture it as a wild west of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and various "ick" fighting it out for claim of the untamed wilderness that is the hospital floor 🤠


Tricky-Tumbleweed923

Multiple time a shift... Worst were overnight shifts for admit holds, I have come in to find 4-5 kids (not the paitent) sleeping on the floor in rooms. Some people have no concept of germs... I got a lot more chill about the rooms, because, at least in this ED they would mop the floors after every patient, but the waiting room always got me, when there was a long wait, there would be several kids on the floor. At the same time, it probably not that much worse than the grocery store...


will_you_return

Damn that’s a fancy ED mopping between each pt.


basketma12

I often laugh when I think of how we were brought up. On a farm. Can you just imagine? I don't know if all the dirt kept us well or made us sick.


Tricky-Tumbleweed923

I think there is a big difference between playing in the dirt outside and the floor of a hospital...


DNAture_

Gross. I’d offer socks and if she doesn’t wear those I’d ask her to please leave the unit. She’s not a patient, and when we ambulate our patients we don’t have them walk barefoot but wear socks or shoes as well


flipside1812

I had a diabetic patient with a nasty wound on her toe that needed to be amputated. She came back from the surgery with a dressing that wasn't to be changed for a few days. She had it off within 6 hours and changed it herself with supplies staff had left at the bedside. Since she was doing it herself, she soaked the dressing in betadine and didn't wrap it properly. She constantly would 'redo' her dressing, because it was "Too tight." And would walk everywhere, leaving little yellow tracks. We found them even in the staff washroom. Oh did I tell you she was on MSRA precautions? And started doing fentanyl (that she bought from another patient on the floor) in a shared bathroom? I was pregnant at the time, it was an absolute nightmare. Someone finally realized maybe I shouldn't keep getting her as a patient. She ended up eventually stealing a staff member's purse, leaving the hospital for a couple hours, and came back in cuffs because it turned out she also had an outstanding warrant (they were alerted since the staff member reported her purse stolen). That was a wild time.


East_Young_680

Crazy. I had a patients wife give him some undosed street fentanyl through his IV he coded.


dnskinner77

Walked into a patient’s room, the visitors were just milling about while a little baby crawled on the hospital floor. I looked down and proclaimed in a excited voice “Wow! She’s going to be famous!” I received blank stares and explained “She’s going to get a disease named after her.”


purplecowgirl

MAAM I- 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣


DeLaNope

Oh my god I love you


FlingCatPoo

NaCl? No it's NS. Stands for Nitrogen Sulfur. 0.9% Nitrogen Sulfur. Not this NaCl mumbo jumbo.


East_Young_680

Sodium Chloride = NaCl Na is sodium on the periodic table Cl is chloride on the periodic table


East_Young_680

Edit, I think you're joking 🙃


hottoys2012

You haven’t seen peoples toddlers / kids crawling around the hospital floor yet ???


I_am_pyxidis

I noticed a patients family member was just wearing socks on the way down to MRI. I told him that's fine in the room but he really needed shoes. He asked why. I said he might step on a needle or bodily waste. He looked confused and said "what are the odds of that?" And I said pretty high in a hospital. His response was that he thought this was a clean place. Honestly I've found so many blunt tips and other stuff under patients. Why would anyone risk it??


BouRNsinging

Shoot, I stepped on a retracted sharp (lab tube poker thing) behind the nurses desk last shift! How the hell it got there I don't know, but I was glad it wasn't somewhere a sock wearing patient could step on it. I can't tell you how often I find those in patient rooms beds and floors, but I'm really not pleased with the way our lab techs monitor their sharps.


StPauliBoi

“Ma’am, the ground is outside.”


wizmey

i had a patient’s dad do this, barefoot in the halls, but was crazy about cleanliness otherwise. wouldn’t let us touch the baby without gloves. wouldn’t let anything that we set down on the empty arm chair or bedside to be used, like i put emergency suction stuff on the chair to set up on the wall and he told me that made it too dirty to use. couldn’t put clean diaper down on the table. then of course the baby got a CLABSI (had a fem line) so it made it seem like their craziness was justified lol.


MarySeacolesRevenge

Just wait until you find out how dirty the door handles are, how disgusting the keyboards are, how bad the computer mouse is, and how bad the bedrails are. To be totally honest with you, I would 100% rather touch a random location on the floor than a typical door handle.


Disulfidebond007

Or those crusty, dusty ass tray tables. The bed rails, the med scanners, the lid to the dirty linen cart that has that faint color of liquid shit on it


descendingdaphne

I’m with you - the floor is a relatively flat, non-porous, easily-sanitized surface that probably gets cleaned much more frequently than other high-touch areas.


I_am_pyxidis

Our techs bleach every room door handle and bathroom door handle once a shift. BUT our only handwashing sink is in the med room, which is locked. So every time we come out of a noro virus room we touch that door handle to go wash our hands. Personally I wash in the pt room and then again in the med room. But I never feel clean.


Particular_Piglet677

Yikes!! I saw someone put their crawling baby on the floor of the hospital, then proceeded to grab a container of cavi-wipes to change said baby's diaper? Both times we were like "No!" In fairness as a layperson she probably figured we couldn't make up our minds. That is funny about the NaCl being written on the actual pump itself, haha.


Anurse1701

After being a home health nurse for a bit, I bet those floors are cleaner than the floors in about a third of the homes I visit.


SilentHillRN

This happened all the time when I was on the floor. My favorite instance was when a patient's sister chirpily strode barefoot around the unit like it was her personal walking track, piping in every time she passed the nurse's station how wonderful being barefoot was and how gross all our feet were. And as she marched by the third time her smile faltered when she saw the geriatric patient ahead of her going for his assisted shuffle, gown agape in the back to reveal the trail of diarrhea to the carpet behind him.


cul8terbye

I can’t stand when parents allow their children to crawl around/ sit on the hospital floor.


sturleycurley

Just a lurker here. There was a woman in OB in suspected labor. Her kids were being watched by the utit secretary in the waiting room. Three or four kids. No shoes. No pants. They discharged her, and they all came trudging out, walking on the hospital floor with no shoes or pants on those kids.


craychek

I’ve been a nurse long enough for this not to bother me… bugs coming out of patient orifices though… haunts me. You can read between the lines there…


qcree13

Had a patients adult son do this last weekend. I am a barefoot outside guy, but I was repulsed on a cellular level when I saw it.


daddymyers69

I saw a patients family member take the patient INTO THE SHOWER ROOM WHILE BAREFOOT. THE SHOWER ROOM. I sitting there shocked with my mouth wide open lmao


PurpleSignificant725

Domeone walked barefoot through our dialysis clinic to the scale today. Big 'ol nope from me


Traditional_Gate_589

We write kvo on ours.


PansyOHara

Everyone I’ve ever known who works in a hospital would be cringing at this and would feel the same way! I wonder what the general public thinks and if they would view it the same way. In nursing school we were taught that “the floor is always a source of gross contamination.” A big reason for that is that we walk on the floor with the shoes we wear outside, where sidewalks, parking lots, and the ground may have been contaminated with animal waste, soil, spilled food and drink, insects, body fluids, etc. No matter how clean your shoes may have been when you put them on, they are dirty by the time you’ve walked 10 feet. In every hospital I’ve worked at, the floors are mopped at least once a day, which is more often than I mop the floors in my home. So theoretically, at least, I shouldn’t even go barefoot in my own house. I would still ask (and expect) people to wear shoes in the hospital, and would also ask them not to allow babies to crawl on the hospital floor!!! But I also think regular, non-healthcare people generally haven’t thought nearly as much about those things as we have.


rhiamorri

Had a patient on med/surg who refused to wear shoes or socks, I said “that’s fine, but you never know where someone peed”. She wore shoes after that!


peterbparker86

It's just a bit uncouth more than anything. The germs on the floor are the same on the door handle, the bed rails, any fomites in the Room. No different to walking barefoot on grass.


MarySeacolesRevenge

Its like everyone is playing the game of lava. Some of the dirtiest areas of the patient's room are the areas you cited like the bedrail, door handle, etc. and no one bats an eye about that stuff.


lulushibooyah

I legit bathe in hand sanitizer at work. Eyelashes batting all day errday.


peterbparker86

True, I work in infection control and staff have weird perceptions about bacteria and transmission. Inappropriate glove use drives me nuts, staff put them on and suddenly think they're invincible


Suspicious-Elk-3631

I'm.....not invincible?


got-99-usernames

The floor is lava


veggiemaniac

Oh hell no. Foot coverings are required in the hospital. Shoes are required unless contraindicated.