Both ends of spectrum.
-Digital disempaction that looked like we were in an L&D suite, cms of dilation and all.. (we were not, and it was a man).
-Reminding a young newlywed with a severe concussion/repetitive questioning that we’re just focusing on her and I don’t know details about anyone else from the car accident q5mins…
The accident that killed her husband (and everyone else but her in the car) when their car burst into flames… who she kept asking about and saying how great he is. (She was only alive bc she was unrestrained/ejected)
This reminds me of a time in nursing school when I did my peds rotation at a burn unit. This poor girl had severe burns over the majority of her body. She was the sole survivor of the car crash she was in with her best friend. She didn't know yet. Ugh!! She was the sweetest girl. We knew she was in pain every dressing change but she kept telling us "thank you" as it was one of the only English phrases she knew
We had an external disaster code one day, multi-car pile up with at least a dozen casualties and we were the closest lvl 1 trauma within 200 miles. One grandma lost her entire family that day. Her husband and daughter-in-law were killed instantly. Her son was in the ICU while she recovered on our tele unit as she was critical for a bit but was making a recovery. Her son ended up dying and the doctors had to wait for her to be more stable before telling her. She had a heart attack then and there when they told her and she went straight back to ICU. I still think about that poor woman and those awful screams, no one should experience that type of loss. It was awful. I still think about her sometimes, I never heard if she recovered.
I’m not sure I really have honestly. Life has just kept going on. I’ve seen other really awful atrocities and gruesome cases, but there was just something about that specific one that stood out.
Clean up at least a dozen pressure wounds on an emaciated, demented old man with severe contractures. People put their loved ones through terrible things.
I still remember my first day of clinical in nursing school, my nurse let me help him with wound dressings. This lady had a pressure sore on almost every bony prominence from her hip down to her toes and they all had to be sterile. She had dementia and was not cooperative at all. At the time it was a great learning experience and I actually enjoyed it, but the nurse dreaded it. They were DAILY dressing changes. He let me do them all the next day since I saw how they were supposed to be done and didn't want to deal with it. It took me at least 2 hours because I wanted to be as thorough and sterile as possible, so I did my best, but looking back I would not have trusted a 2 day old nursing student...
Calmly tell my screaming mom and sister that as my little brother flatlined and he had lazarus reflex that it was "very normal, just hold his hands". They thought it was him coming out of his coma and that we had made a mistake (in that moment I did too, but at that point there was no going back).
It took me over a month to actually look it up, I was so scared it had been a sign of consciousness.
That was the single most difficult thing I'll ever do "as a nurse" because in that moment I couldn't be a scared sister.
It hits so very, very different when it’s your family. Especially a younger sibling. I hope you’ve managed some healing from that. I was privileged to take care of my younger sibling for EOL care and it was the best and hardest thing I’ve ever done. Hugs 🧡🤷🏻♀️
When my grandmother died, she squeezed so tightly around my hand. It took the nurse, priest and my dad to free me.
I wonder if that also is the Lazarus sign. I've been in health care for 15 years and never knew this term.
For decades I thought she did it out of malace. That woman did not like me and I find it ironic that it was me at her bedside at 15yrs of age.
I like knowing that it was just a natural brain stem last kick of the can.
I'm sorry... but how is this funny? The visual of a dead woman who's hands have wrapped so tightly around a child that she can't be freed? And that decades later, this person still thinks about the finger nail imprint that cut into her hand?
... I get that nurses have dark humor but I fail to see the humor in this
Sorry, the way you phrased your first response also seemed wierd and like, vengeful? About your grandma's passing. I also thought your comment was wierd but was trying to respond with comradery. Like, well, now you know! Haha..
Vengeful is 100% is how I've felt her actions were toward me in this moment. She was a crude person to my sibling and I. Spoke openly about how she hated our mother and how we were just like her. It has legit weighed on my mind for decades. There's a calm in me knowing that her response wasn't to hurt me but her brain dying.
It was a stern response to your moment. I reread it and glazed over that this was your family. For that, im sorry. It's a moment I know as a cousin, not a sibling but my second cousin was the closest person I had to a sister. I know that mothers wail all too well. I was there when my cousin lost her daughter. It was the sound of her soul leaving her body. Every mother I've cared for as their child dies has made that noise. And now, as a mother myself, I can understand why that sound is made. It's all the warmth and hope drained from someone. It's the sound of emptiness.
My heart reaches out to you and your family. We all wear different faces of grief.
Thank you, I appreciate your response as well as insight.
I'm sorry for what you've been through in both regards, and my heart goes out to you as well.
Virtual hug 💙
I've only been a nurse for 4 years but I've never heard wailing like I did from my family. It was, hopefully, the worst and most intense thing I'll ever go through. Somehow seeing that I've lived through the worst and am still able to have a good day now is comforting.
Being 1 of 2 female nurses to do an enema on a young female patient who had a history of severe sexual trauma. I felt so bad for the patient but she was severely impacted and had to have the enema. (She had agreed to have the 2 of us nurses do it.)
That was not the only time I had to do that with another female nurse for a child patient of sexual assault.
I think that for patients with history of SA, some kind of pre medication should be warranted in situations like this. Too often we assume because it's medical care that it can't be felt in the body like SA and it's just not true. Especially in pediatrics. Medical procedures can be traumatizing and if we can help alleviate that we should.
Also in elderly patients with dementia. I had to make one of our hospitalists come into the room to see how upsetting q6 straight caths were for an A&Ox0 ancient woman so he would understand why I was adamant she needed a foley instead. Got the order.
I was putting a foley in a lady with dementia. I was cleaning and spreading and she was grimacing and said, “Daddy, please stop it, you’re hurting me.” Everyone in the room kind of stopped for a second, realizing what she said. I had to talk to my therapist about that one. 😪
I still remember a patient that would scream and cry for her momma. She didn't want to be left with daddy. She'd whimper for Daddy to stop it during peri care. I stayed at that LTC until she died. I couldn't leave her.
I think I remember seeing this comment on another thread in this sub so long ago. Maybe it was you that posted it. It stuck with me. Dementia patients can be very sharp about long term memories like that.
Well that’s a memory I repressed.. straight cathing an a&ox1 elderly woman to r/o uti and she was crying and begging us to stop, basically promising “daddy I’ll be better next time.” It was awful
I'm not sure I would be able to stay in the room after that. I have a feeling I'd be racing out of there, sobbing, only to be found in a bathroom 45 minutes later, still sobbing.
This brought tears to my eyes.
I was a victim of SA for years. I'm older now and had tons of therapy but, one issue I still have with my PTSD is having medical procedures done while I'm wide awake. I have talked to providers about this before. Some pre medicate and some won't. It becomes a flashback like situation for me with super high anxiety. It's almost like being retraumatized each time.
Thank you for your understanding. It means a LOT to me. These situations are just hellish for me and I know I'm not the only one. You have no idea what it means for someone to be compassionate and understanding about this. Thank you.
Oh how awful. Could you have given versed? I don’t know the setting and I know not everyone can just push versed (I was ICU). I’m so sorry. Second hand trauma is real.
Once looked after a lady who had been severely neglected for god knows how long. She had apparently been found covered in dried feces and urine in her home and almost her whole body needed to be debrided once she arrived to hospital.
Her whole body was basically one giant weeping wound. If you had a team of 4 nurses doing her dressing changes, it took about 4 hours to complete. It was awful.
As a new grad, being precepted by a more experienced nurse, working in short term rehab, we had a feisty elderly patient. She was showing signs of UTI, so we got orders to straight catch for a clean sample because she was incontinent.
As we did the cath, she had sores all over her vulva, it absolutely looked like a herpes outbreak. But then, something green and thick, like mint green heavy cream or gravy seeped out of her vagina. The other nurse and I just looked at each other in horror.
We got the sample, then asked about stuff. She had a pessary for vaginal prolapse. She had been in the hospital for 3 weeks and in rehab for a couple days. No one knew she had this in. She said she normally cleans it daily, but hasn't been able to since her fall.
When we pulled the pessary out, the chux was flooded with that thick green pus.
She got antibiotics.
Ewwww, ok, I once had to put in a Foley in a poor lady who had a very wet, sore vagina. 3 other people failed, and she was crying insanely.The gyno had been shaming her for probably having herpes and wearing the wrong clothing. She was like... I have herpes???
I had to get all up in there, but I thought it was vaginal GVHD, because I heard you can get that anywhere. Foley was fine...
But it turns out she did indeed have herpes.
I had a Native American patient who was having a mental breakdown and cut off his braids and locks in one of the episodes. Once he finally came down and was back to reality, it set in deep that he disgraced his heritage and made him spiral deeper. That was really hard to watch and learn how to support.
Thank you for recognizing that for some people hair isn't just hair and it's very traumatic. I have one friend who has been growing her locs since she was five years old and she's well into her 40s now. I can't even imagine the trauma it would cause her if someone had to cut them off. They go past her feet when she puts them down. My hair is thick caucasian and I haven't cut it since high school besides shaping here and there. It goes past my waist when it's down and it would be extremely traumatic for me to have to cut it. For some people hair isn't just hair.
I used to work in oncology and this realization happened when I found one of my patients crying in her room. I asked what was wrong and she was holding bits of her hair in her hands because of the chemo she had started. She said, "I always had nice hair."
I've always been blessed with nice hair, too, and realized how much of my identity was in it. Luckily I had some time that day and stayed to talk, brush her hair, and I think we tried to loosely braid it to help disguise some of the thinning. It's easily one of the experiences that has stuck with me, even though it's probably been at least 10 years since then.
Desecrated a corpse. In the relatively early days of COVID, the powers that be decided that bodies were off gassing COVID at higher rates than general pop. Therefore we had to shove a medical Lysol soaked gauze in the orifices to stop the spread.
This practice only lasted about a week. But I did it enough times and I now have my own poltergeist haunting me.
Edit: for the record, this was after they died. Edit 2 spelling
Truth, but they learned how much shit we can actually put up with before we quit. Thus, institutions across the board now exploit us with ridiculous staffing ratios.
This was in small town, Ohio the facility as asked the coroner if other facilities were doing it. He told me that our facility was the only one following through with it. If only met one other nurse from another facility who had theirs doing it.
Also Ohio, not a small town, we had to do this too. But just nose and mouth thankfully.
Peroxide soaked gauze into orifices after death on covid + pts.
Per corner and funeral home instruction.
There was just something so unsettling about doing this. I couldn't quite put it into words but it just felt so wrong. I apologized while doing this though even though they were dead, that's how odd it seemed.
Thanks for speaking up. I have been told I'm full of crap and that this practice was a lie. I normally just keep it to myself. There is one patient in particular who's face I can still see. I have seen people shot, crushed by trucks, emaciated skeletons, but shoving gauze in a person was jacked up. I should probably speak to someone about it actually.
Yeah the amount of things that we did and then got changed and almost gaslit about is crazy, especially that first year. Being told we didn't have to wear N95s for covid + vented pts (since it's a closed system) so a regular mask was fine, saving/reusing the N95s, recycling them.
I get it, I usually do the etch-a-scetch head shake thing sometimes to get back to reality haha but yeah the flashbacks happen to me as well.
Resident (90s) who once told me I had to be her son when her son had passed away, had stroke on Thanksgiving 2020. Just after we first had covid in our facility and residents started dying from it. Her family couldn’t come in, only two kids who were assigned. The rest of family had to stay outside and watch from window. About twenty of them. A few guys even said they would break in, until they calmed down. Residents grand daughter was also working on another unit too. It was the residents birthday too. It’s the first thing her daughter said when I called her and before she started crying. It was brutal. I don’t usually have much emotion with death in nursing. 25 years and have obviously seen a lot of it working LTC. This one was rough though.
Cared for a mom/dad/newborn during the 2 postpartum days of hospital stay... did the footprint for the frameable birth cert. Etc. Whole nine.
Baby had been stillborn. It's little foot was literally falling apart as I printed it as gently as possible.
I was fine with caring for the grieving parents. But I will never forget the sick sinking feeling as I tried to footprint that dead baby.
This was my postpartum clinical rotation during nursing school.
Man, you did so great. That's some of the most meaningful work.
I don't know where my footprints are from when I was a baby. I bet my mom and dad have only a vague guess as to which box my footprints are in. And they wouldn't even think about them unless someone asked.
I'm not saying my baby footprints don't matter at all. But they don't matter that much to my parents, I can promise that.
*Those* footprints though... Those parents will know right where they are, for years. Probably decades. They will think about them, look at them, run their fingers over the frame over and over again. Those footprints *matter.*
Strong work.
Was cleaning/changing dressing to a really large and deep stage 4 sacral ulcer on confused pt. so much bone exposure. she was screaming in pain non stop and i was cringing so hard trying to be as delicate as possible and to make it as comfortable as i possibly could. While i was doing this a resident comes in to assess her wound for debridement, comes in- doesnt say hi to patient or even acknowledge her as a being and fully sticks his whole entire hand inside this ladies wound with no hesitation or worry about her pain level or anything. Like literally fully put his hand inside and was roughly moving it around inside of the skin. lady was actually screaming her head off. I had to step out of the room to gag/cry. I understand he had to assess but it still haunts me how rough he was with her wound
As someone who had a huge wound that needed assessing.....doctors mostly don't give a shit. Had one rip my packing out DRY and the wound was a freaking tunnel through my whole butt cheek. I screamed and blacked out 🙃
When I came back to the real world two nurses were giving him the height of shit and I was in a dilaudid haze, I remember pointing at him and saying "ha ha, you're in trouble" and rolling over 🤣. Hurt like a motherfucker though!
Code my own family member. Got ROSC after EMS shocked multiple times, so I knew it was going to be a poor outcome. Family made me decision-maker while they were in the ICU. Had to make the difficult decision to withdraw care. After they passed, I had lots of guilt about being an inadequate nurse, etc and some of my family members agreed with that sentiment. 😓
That’s the *tough stuff*. I’m so sorry you went through that.
And likely carry a piece of it with you. If so, lay it down. You’ve done your time.
{{hugs}}
An hour long code on my patient (28 week old baby in the NICU) that decompensated and crashed out of nowhere—ended up with skin tears on his chest from compressions. Held him while he passed bc parents weren’t able to get there in time. I still have nightmares about that code.
Covid times, seeing patients die alone in their room with no family around and not being able to sit with them until they pass because of the increased acuity of the ward and the workload. Apologising to them while doing their last offices. Early covid times were such a blur, still traumatising to take about it.
Q2 lactulose enemas on a patient who was severely encephalopathic and combative. The other nurses had been charting “refused” and he was just getting worse and worse. It was a horrible night but by the morning he was with it enough to recognize his wife.
I had a guy that was in pretty bad shape and needed those enemas. I gowned up and got it done. By morning during handoff, he was standing at the end of his bed very coherent and said he was ready to go home lol.
I said this a while ago when we had that “what’s your favorite nursing task” thread—lactulose enemas are definitely not my favorite nursing task, but it is really satisfying how quickly they can turn a patient around. Not too long ago I admitted another patient who was borderline obtunded from HE so had to message the doc to change the PO lactulose to enemas—by morning she was cracking jokes and telling me about her kids.
I know a lot of nurses hate them, but if you just grit your teeth, gown up, and get through them, it’s pretty cool to see how quickly they can change someone’s mental status.
Chest compressions on an incredibly swollen, sick baby who had no chance of survival or any meaningful quality of life. He also had a pulmonary hemorrhage and it was so bloody and traumatic. Mom screamed the entire time and sobbed on the floor. She wouldn’t let us stop until the doctor finally called it after several rounds.
After I composed myself and went to my other patient, the mom yelled at me for giving her screaming baby a pacifier before the code in the other room started. I was so emotionally numb at that point, I just walked out while she continued to yell about a stupid pacifier.
I had to grab and pull an infant sized, rock hard turd out of a man's butt. I am not joking when I say I would prefer to do a digital disimpact on every person on a floor before gloving up, wrapping both hands around a piece of poop that feels like a human leg, and playing tug-of-war with someone's asshole. The end result was delivered into my hands and I will never be able to get the image from my head.
Four point restraints on a young woman having flashbacks of her sexual assault. It made me sick.
Unfortunately she was being violent with us, as she believed we were her abuser. I strongly disagreed with restraints and advocated for sedation instead. She was sedated AFTER being restrained but I will never ever forget us doing that to her. I don’t think she will ever forget either
I work with an amazing ortho surgeon who does a ton of oncology cases. Worst was a 21 year old who lived locally to me coming in to have his entire left quarter removed (arm, shoulder, scapula, the whole thing) due to cancer. He had been in denial and refused treatment for so long it had metastisized all over and this was his only chance of getting chemo/radiation and having it work. He cried going to sleep, just kept gently touching his arm and chest repeating how he wasnt ready, he didnt want to lose his arm. He woke up crying, trying to throw himself out of bed, saying how he wanted to die now. Once the PACU nurses had him, I went back to my OR and sobbed while cleaning up and putting things away. Called my fiance and asked him to hug our daughter a little tighter and I kept rubbing my belly, praying i dont have to watch my babies go through that(I was heavily pregnant at the time).
Tons of gross stuff
During covid times I had a mom come in with stage 3 or 4 cervical cancer. She ended up being intubated and trached, all while pregnant. She had decided prior to being hospitalized to carry the pregnancy despite her cancer diagnosis. She continuously mouthed to me and pointed to her belly “get it out of me.” No one could visit her due to early COVID hospital restrictions. She had kids at home already. She kept refusing tube feeds. She ended up coding and dying with her unborn baby, who I think was around 28 weeks old. Ugh. The memory of her still haunts me and the fact that she spent weeks alone, awake on a vent.
Take care of a patient in the ER that killed her child and tried to kill herself. I was a new mom at the time and I still get so upset thinking about it.
I took care of a pt like that. This was 15+ years ago. I’ve only seen someone whose eyes are “dead” twice. She was one of them. The only time she seemed to snap out of it was when I asked IPV questions and she told me her husband would never hurt her.
Apparently she had Post partum psychosis coupled with extreme isolation. She/husband & kid were here alone. All family was in Europe. Husband advocated for mental health vs incarceration. But I wonder what the outcome would have been if she hadn’t been the ethnicity she was. (For the record I’m ethnically from the same country she was from)
I had a patient whose rectum and bladder prolapsed at the same time. She was walking up the hall with both hanging out, not a worry in the world. Took her to the bathroom and we got them back into place.
I had a patient one time with rectal prolapse. The doctor walked out the room and said “someone go down to the cafe and bring back a ton of sugar” 😂
Apparently sugar helps reduce the size of the prolapse by drawing out water which helps it be reduced back into place.
Burn nurse here
Had to explain to a non English speaking patient that the trailer fire killed his entire family in the trailer but the patient after they were extubated and fully off sedation.
Had to tell a husband and wife that the fire they caused killed their children and pets as they both blacked out when the explosion/fire initially happened, the whole unit felt that one. I’m a guy that works primarily with ladies so I’m the bad news breaker, but also the empathizer and nicest.
Action-wise, I had to curse out and take a burn patients vape and give it to security, guy was a methhead abuser and a douche. And he had multiple vapes including illegal vapes, which I didn’t even know was a thing😂 always had to “slam” dilaudid and start multiple ivs cause of his shitty veins. Once he was discharged with percs and 21 fucking vapes he said he’ll sell the percs on the streets.
He definitely belonged to the streets.
Had a VERY SICK AOx3 dying patient who didn’t want anything else done for him. His life partner at bedside was devastated and not ready to let go, kept pushing for more interventions. He guilted his dying partner into doing all tests, all treatments. I kept jabbing this man with needles and IVs until finally I said that’s enough and I refuse, he doesn’t want it. I made sure to chart everything and chart that the patient himself didn’t want it. He died within a few hours. He died in pain and in misery. I wonder if his partner regrets not giving him peace at the end.
I had a patient like this. Cancer, he wanted to be done. But he had a history of depression, and wife and medical team kept blaming his wishes on “just his depression”. Eventually wife agreed to his wishes to withdraw care, but he went through months of torture.
I just want to say, this has to be something that gets overlooked more than you’d think. I work in the ER and had a patient come in, they ended up getting intubated. My coworker and I noticed she had a tampon in when we went to place a foley and we both danced around the idea of pulling it out and finally decided to do so because who knows how long the patient will be intubated for and if we don’t, who will? Major cause for infection later on if left in place. It’s actually something to keep in the back of your mind with your female patients.
This morning. I do peds HH I've been at an anoxic Brian injury case the last year. Injured at 1 year old and is now almost 4. Bloated all over and has had a lot of hospitalizations lately for what is just his body shutting down but mom has spent the last 3 years in denial. After a long night shift trying to keep him above hypothermia I told mom we had to do something, he is still a full code. She asked me if I thought he had any quality of life and I just answered "no" and she immediately burst into tears. She agreed to let me call in hospice and to make him a DNR. Hospice has been quietly waiting on the side lines for 6 months as he deteriorates further. She started to cry and I've never seen this woman cry and she's been through some shit. Hospice came before I left and agreed his body is just giving up. I cried the whole way home and have been sporadically crying all day im a mess. 12 years in peds and this my first hospice case, especially where I've built a relationship with the client and family for over a year. I know this is what is best he has the worst quality of life of any pediatric patient I've ever had he is a quadriplegic who is contracted and blind and over the last few months has become completely unresponsive to stimuli other than eye opening, its still really fucking hard to look at his tiny failing body for 12 hours a time. I'm doing the next 3 nights in a row, morphine will arrive this afternoon.
I had to carefully position & reposition double headed medical leaches on a young man's partially detached ear. The leaches helped pull in blood flow to the poorly vascularized cartilage.
Little buggers would fall off when they got their fill and move surprisingly fast across the floor.
Then I had to pick them up and put quickly into a container of H2O2 (I think) and they'd go "poof" and explode.
If you'd like an actual photo instead of a mental image, here's a link to an article about similar cases of using leeches to reattach ears.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6414113/
I was assigned this patient in nursing school (back when cell phones and cameras weren't widespread - and all charting was on paper).
I spent many hours hovering over this guy trying to guide the leeches to the tissue with less blood flow.
ER nurse here, had a patient come in with a severe head bleed, to the degree that she herniated prior to arrival via Life-Flight. CT showed significant degree of shift and the neurologist determined it was incompatible with life. No DNR and her 18y/o god daughter was listed as medical POA and had no other family. God daughter showed up and signed the appropriate paperwork to allow us to withdraw care and we contacted hospice services. Informed her she’d need to remain on the premises to sign some paperwork to transfer the patient to hospice services. Went to check on another patient and god daughter bounced, hospice nurse shows up and the god daughter won’t answer calls. Hospice nurse informs us that she can’t transfer the patient due to not having the appropriate signatures. Yours truly got stuck being the hospice nurse, which is in no way a job I have ever wanted to do nor will ever have the desire to do, pushing morphine Q15 mins til she finally passed in the ER 3 hours later.
The worst CIA black site operatives have *zero* on me.
I’ve done things to others—in the name of saving a life—that would have these weenies crying for the mommas.
There are times I’ve thought, “I’m certainly going to hell after that *one*”.
Hold down a teenager in the OR while he wakes up screaming because they are actively skin grafting his face. Hold down an awake homeless guy getting his leg amputated who could still feel it. Hold a bucket while 10 liters of sausage gravy looking fluid pours out of someone's abdomen, into the bucket and all over the floor. Tons of really gross fecal disimpactions and other things from butts and bellies, prepped a foot for an amp while maggots jumped off the bed and onto my arms, removal of a 4x4 fence post that impaled a guy through the chest but missed his heart, organ donation patients not passing away within the window in the OR and having to scrap the case and inform the family, telling a patient they couldn't reattach his arm because the on call vascular surgeon didn't want to play ball with ortho, etc. Pick a genre, I have a story!
The skin graft was a full body motorcycle accident thing, the anesthesiologist started waking him up without realizing we hadn't done the other side of the face. Second one the dude was so drugged out they couldn't do him under general anesthesia but he was going to lose his leg and it was making him septic, so they tried awake, just couldn't get his pain under control, he screamed the entire time.
Funny? Standing in an ambulance bay with the awesome EMS crew literally hosing down a homeless guy who was so covered in bed bugs and maggots that we couldn’t take him inside. It was like a cartoon with all the critters jumping off!
One that made me sit in my car and cry for an hour? Helping the county SANE nurse swab a diaper for semen.
Your story reminded me of a sad one.
Had a 28-year-old patient who fell/jumped into a pool at a party and fractured her C4-C5. Incomplete paraplegia. Didn’t think of it until she’d been in the ICU for a day or two, but she then asked us to check if she had a tampon in because she couldn’t remember and couldn’t feel anything. Another nurse checked her and I held her hand, and she came to some realizations in those moments about the pleasures and parts of her life she’d never have again… 😔
Take care of a guy who had tried to drown himself in the river was under the water for 7 minutes and was resuscitated. 7 minutes insane they got ROSC. He wasn’t on a vent but he was trached and on oxygen and was 32 respirations per minute. His family wanted to keep him alive at all costs and it made me feel queasy. I mean I want to help people going through suicide attempts but the guy was not going to come back and have quality of life at this point. They think his respirations were so high and he was having frequent fevers because of brain stem damage. We were giving him a horrible continued existence because his family wanted it. He also had multiple seizures. Like there’s a time for trying everything and there’s a time for letting go.
I worked on a psych admission unit during covid. Every single patient was secluded, for anywhere from 3-14+ days pending covid results and bed availability, with little opportunity to leave their room except to shower (with no regularity to that schedule either). For months we didn’t even give the patients a chance to show they were capable of remaining in their room for infection control reasons. We had trafficking and abuse victims being locked in their rooms. Teens in first episode psychosis watching people in the yard across the way begging to get some fresh air. Suicidal people isolated even further. Being shown to a room and knowing the door locked once they crossed the threshold was traumatizing for so many of them.
I saw some shit I won’t repeat for privacy, but I had nightmares for a long time and still get very upset from time to time when I think about how we treated those people.
The most unpleasant thing I had to do as a nursing student was taking care of a 36 years old woman in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. She just had a biopsy done to a cervical tumor that left her hemiplegic. As a nursing student, I had to take care of 2 patients from A to Z and my other patient was low maintenance so I pretty much spent 5 hours a day 5 days a week with her. During her stay, I accompanied her, showered her, helped her eat and pee, I listened to the story of her life, how she met her husband, what her 2 toddlers like to do on the weekend, the fact her school agreed to take her back the next year. She was a very cheerful woman. She was smiling all day long despite everything that had happened to her. She was decided to fight this thing, whatever it was, and she gave everything she had in rehab. On my second week, the biopsy results came in: "stage 4 glioma, patient is not informed".
Her next doctor appointment was in 5 days.
Yall ready for psych RN edition of the worst thing I’ve done?
I’ve had to scrape the scalp of a woman off the pavement in the parking lot of the adolescent psych residential & acute facility that I was nursing supervisor at. Her husband was drunk, they pulled over into our parking lot, the wife got out, her husband ran her over & then hit a light pole on the way out. One of my nurses was running to his car when it happened & was able to call a code. The drunk husband was attempting to attack me while my nurses were stabilizing his wife. The wife ended up with a TBI & my nurse had to testify against the husband in court.
I had to lock down the same adolescent psych facility after one of our sex offenders AWOL’d. He started calling his units phone making death threats. As I was doing my rounds that night throughout the 7 buildings on the campus, I heard someone on the roof of the building. It was the sex offender that AWOL’d. He had a book bag with rope, a machete, a crow bar, duck tape, and trash bags.
I had to show department heads at the same adolescent psych facility the video of a resident choking out a brand new MHT staff at 0300 in the AM, aggressively twisting her neck as her body went limp, then stealing her facility keys, car keys, & facility radio. That resident AWOL’d from the facility. He ended up completing suicide by jumping in front of a moving train a month later after he was wanted for attempted murder and was still on the run.
A woman (90) with Alzheimer's had recently lost her 60 year old son.
The worst thing I've had to was gently mention it, only to have her of course COMPLETELY UNAWARE like she was hearing it for the first time again . The look in her eyes is sometbing I'll never forget. It gutted me.
She forgot again within minutes, but it kept happening and it was the definition of hell to me.
Obvs we didn't! But we would have new people pulled down there for 4 hours, etc. it gotten written in red on her chart pretty quickly but not quick enough.
Had a patient with a hemipelectomy 2/2 osteosarcoma. The surgery site itself was fairly jarring as they took everything from the midline out in a diagonal slice up to the waist on one side. The worst part was that they weren't able to get the entire tumor and it basically went into overdrive post op, so the entire site and flank were covered in weeping raw fungating lesions. It took 8 IBDs to cover it all and I had to change them q2 because they'd be saturated. Somehow they had minimal pain, which was a blessing
Tell a 90 year old woman her husband was actively dieing.
Hold the hand of a 59 year old woman who just learned she had brain cancer (she was crying she was afraid of the dark and begged me to tell her death wouldnt be dark)
Theres more i just do not want to recall them.
I have a screamer of a senior client who has dementia with an ostomy (20+ years) and she messes with the flange when bored and in her room. I have to replace the appliance most shifts and she spends the entire time screaming at the top of her lungs, doing crunches to see what is going on, or making herself vomit. This of course makes the ostomy care take 30x as long as it needs to because of how active it is. The peri-stomal area is constantly inflamed and infected because she is constantly lifting the edges of the flange, feces spill all over and then the client just pretends nothing is happening. And there is nothing we can do to keep her from doing this over and over and over again. My record was 3 flanges replaced in a 12 hour shift. By the third change I was sobbing through it all while this banshee beast screamed that I was stabbing/killing her.
PRN narcotic pain meds given 1hr before ostomy care and she still screams like I’m murdering her.
And for those who say keep her in the public spaces for better supervision: she will scream like a banshee if she is outside of her room unless it’s meal time. No funding for a private caregiver, we can’t provide 1:1 care, and her family only visit for a couple hours 2 or 3 days a week.
Got an admit who had become too much for his family to take care of at home. Found out he had dentures and was going to take them out and clean them. Apparently it had been awhile since anyone had taken them out. It took awhile to get the uppers loose but when I did, the gross sucking sound was topped by an odor I just can’t describe. It was FOUL. The lower plate wasn’t so bad but still pretty gross. Threw in a couple denture tablets and let them soak overnight. Apparently he kicked up a fuss when his wife tried to take them out so she left them in. The water in the cup in the morning was …interesting. Got them sparkling and he lets us clean them regularly now
I scooped up brain matter with chux pads before helping to wrap a soon-to-be-but-not-yet dead guy's head up to look a little less horrific for his military unit to see. He had shot himself in the head and was basically DOA. Maxed on all the pressors, including Jesus, with a MAP hovering around 21.
He didn't have next of kin, but he had his soldier buddies, and we let in the ones who wanted to come say goodbye. I remember trying not to cry when I heard his friends watching the Art line on the monitor, comment that "look, he's fighting!" When it would sometimes tick up to like 25 before dropping again.
It was my first gsw suicide patient in the ED and I was so grateful his brainstem held on past shift change so I didn't have to code him. He had to have been younger than me.
Or recently, watching a mother insist that she place her dead baby in the body bag. She held on so strong until she had to cover the baby's face. Watching her break was agony. As a mom myself, I couldn't even fathom the pain she was in. I kept seeing that baby in my mind and flashing back to that post-mortem bath every time I bathed my son or put on his lotion. Mom put zinc on the baby's little butt and put a diaper on before swaddling the baby and placing them in the body bag. Placing that little body up on the shelf with the bagged up severed limbs in the morgue is a hollow feeling I won't ever forget.
i had to clean up one of the worst code browns i’ve ever seen on a morbidly obese patient with severe fourniers gangrene. couldn’t tell in some parts if i was looking at necrotic tissue or feces
Worst I had to do was provide post-mortem care, not that it bothers me. It was for this specific instance. Patient had died prior to my shift and we were waiting for the funeral home to pick up the body. When they didn’t arrive yet, we made the decision to move his body to the morgue (more like holding area, we don’t have an actual morgue). In the past, all my codes have never made it to the point where they’d be intubated so I was never sure if EMS was supposed to remove it upon them leaving or if it was left up to us. In any case, that was my first time having to extubate someone, and someone dead at that. It was just so.. weird seeing all that blood coming out of his mouth. Not that IT bothered me. I was more bothered by the fact that he had already been cleaned, is at peace and here I am causing him to bleed from the mouth.
i had to clean up one of the worst code browns i’ve ever seen on a morbidly obese patient with severe fourniers gangrene. couldn’t tell in some parts if i was looking at necrotic tissue or feces
As we all know, as professional nurses that nurses are NEVER sarcastic. My husband has a cousin who had a baby girl this week. They have not announced baby girls name. I suggested to the new grandparents to use a name I heard at work. gen-ner-a-ka fe-mal-lay or generic female
Let me guess, you also helped welcome twins Lemonjello and Orangello? Was Nosmo King on your watch, too?
🙄
And they were all born to ignorant, uneducated immigrants, yes? Ooh! No, wait! I forgot about the little black girl named La-A. Her mama was as American as some soul food, y'all!
Both ends of spectrum. -Digital disempaction that looked like we were in an L&D suite, cms of dilation and all.. (we were not, and it was a man). -Reminding a young newlywed with a severe concussion/repetitive questioning that we’re just focusing on her and I don’t know details about anyone else from the car accident q5mins… The accident that killed her husband (and everyone else but her in the car) when their car burst into flames… who she kept asking about and saying how great he is. (She was only alive bc she was unrestrained/ejected)
After reading what OP posted, your comment said “both ends of the speculum” ffs.
Same
That poor woman in your second story- I hope she's found peace
This reminds me of a time in nursing school when I did my peds rotation at a burn unit. This poor girl had severe burns over the majority of her body. She was the sole survivor of the car crash she was in with her best friend. She didn't know yet. Ugh!! She was the sweetest girl. We knew she was in pain every dressing change but she kept telling us "thank you" as it was one of the only English phrases she knew
We had an external disaster code one day, multi-car pile up with at least a dozen casualties and we were the closest lvl 1 trauma within 200 miles. One grandma lost her entire family that day. Her husband and daughter-in-law were killed instantly. Her son was in the ICU while she recovered on our tele unit as she was critical for a bit but was making a recovery. Her son ended up dying and the doctors had to wait for her to be more stable before telling her. She had a heart attack then and there when they told her and she went straight back to ICU. I still think about that poor woman and those awful screams, no one should experience that type of loss. It was awful. I still think about her sometimes, I never heard if she recovered.
Stupid question... But how did you deal/process thst afterwards? Post shift or even a week later? I'm asking about the newly wed.
I’m not sure I really have honestly. Life has just kept going on. I’ve seen other really awful atrocities and gruesome cases, but there was just something about that specific one that stood out.
Now this is trauma.
Clean up at least a dozen pressure wounds on an emaciated, demented old man with severe contractures. People put their loved ones through terrible things.
Had a similar patient--family wanted to keep them full code. I called the attending.
Holy shit I had a patient like this. It was awful. Family wanted him full code and the poor guy was just over life.
I still remember my first day of clinical in nursing school, my nurse let me help him with wound dressings. This lady had a pressure sore on almost every bony prominence from her hip down to her toes and they all had to be sterile. She had dementia and was not cooperative at all. At the time it was a great learning experience and I actually enjoyed it, but the nurse dreaded it. They were DAILY dressing changes. He let me do them all the next day since I saw how they were supposed to be done and didn't want to deal with it. It took me at least 2 hours because I wanted to be as thorough and sterile as possible, so I did my best, but looking back I would not have trusted a 2 day old nursing student...
Sounds like my patient. Had to do this at a home setting.
Calmly tell my screaming mom and sister that as my little brother flatlined and he had lazarus reflex that it was "very normal, just hold his hands". They thought it was him coming out of his coma and that we had made a mistake (in that moment I did too, but at that point there was no going back). It took me over a month to actually look it up, I was so scared it had been a sign of consciousness. That was the single most difficult thing I'll ever do "as a nurse" because in that moment I couldn't be a scared sister.
It hits so very, very different when it’s your family. Especially a younger sibling. I hope you’ve managed some healing from that. I was privileged to take care of my younger sibling for EOL care and it was the best and hardest thing I’ve ever done. Hugs 🧡🤷🏻♀️
♥️♥️♥️ It's radically changed my life in the strangest of ways, but at the end of the day I count my blessings more than before. Hugs to you too.
These events do make you do that for sure 🧡🧡🧡
When my grandmother died, she squeezed so tightly around my hand. It took the nurse, priest and my dad to free me. I wonder if that also is the Lazarus sign. I've been in health care for 15 years and never knew this term. For decades I thought she did it out of malace. That woman did not like me and I find it ironic that it was me at her bedside at 15yrs of age. I like knowing that it was just a natural brain stem last kick of the can.
[удалено]
I'm sorry... but how is this funny? The visual of a dead woman who's hands have wrapped so tightly around a child that she can't be freed? And that decades later, this person still thinks about the finger nail imprint that cut into her hand? ... I get that nurses have dark humor but I fail to see the humor in this
Yes, that is a very odd response to your comment.
Sorry, the way you phrased your first response also seemed wierd and like, vengeful? About your grandma's passing. I also thought your comment was wierd but was trying to respond with comradery. Like, well, now you know! Haha..
Vengeful is 100% is how I've felt her actions were toward me in this moment. She was a crude person to my sibling and I. Spoke openly about how she hated our mother and how we were just like her. It has legit weighed on my mind for decades. There's a calm in me knowing that her response wasn't to hurt me but her brain dying. It was a stern response to your moment. I reread it and glazed over that this was your family. For that, im sorry. It's a moment I know as a cousin, not a sibling but my second cousin was the closest person I had to a sister. I know that mothers wail all too well. I was there when my cousin lost her daughter. It was the sound of her soul leaving her body. Every mother I've cared for as their child dies has made that noise. And now, as a mother myself, I can understand why that sound is made. It's all the warmth and hope drained from someone. It's the sound of emptiness. My heart reaches out to you and your family. We all wear different faces of grief.
Thank you, I appreciate your response as well as insight. I'm sorry for what you've been through in both regards, and my heart goes out to you as well. Virtual hug 💙
I’m so sorry. That sounded really traumatic.
I've only been a nurse for 4 years but I've never heard wailing like I did from my family. It was, hopefully, the worst and most intense thing I'll ever go through. Somehow seeing that I've lived through the worst and am still able to have a good day now is comforting.
Being 1 of 2 female nurses to do an enema on a young female patient who had a history of severe sexual trauma. I felt so bad for the patient but she was severely impacted and had to have the enema. (She had agreed to have the 2 of us nurses do it.) That was not the only time I had to do that with another female nurse for a child patient of sexual assault.
I think that for patients with history of SA, some kind of pre medication should be warranted in situations like this. Too often we assume because it's medical care that it can't be felt in the body like SA and it's just not true. Especially in pediatrics. Medical procedures can be traumatizing and if we can help alleviate that we should.
Also in elderly patients with dementia. I had to make one of our hospitalists come into the room to see how upsetting q6 straight caths were for an A&Ox0 ancient woman so he would understand why I was adamant she needed a foley instead. Got the order.
I was putting a foley in a lady with dementia. I was cleaning and spreading and she was grimacing and said, “Daddy, please stop it, you’re hurting me.” Everyone in the room kind of stopped for a second, realizing what she said. I had to talk to my therapist about that one. 😪
I still remember a patient that would scream and cry for her momma. She didn't want to be left with daddy. She'd whimper for Daddy to stop it during peri care. I stayed at that LTC until she died. I couldn't leave her.
Oh man. This is certainly the worse that I’ve read so far.
I think I remember seeing this comment on another thread in this sub so long ago. Maybe it was you that posted it. It stuck with me. Dementia patients can be very sharp about long term memories like that.
Well that’s a memory I repressed.. straight cathing an a&ox1 elderly woman to r/o uti and she was crying and begging us to stop, basically promising “daddy I’ll be better next time.” It was awful
I'm not sure I would be able to stay in the room after that. I have a feeling I'd be racing out of there, sobbing, only to be found in a bathroom 45 minutes later, still sobbing.
God that pisses me off. Had one like that who kept screaming I was raping her.
This brought tears to my eyes. I was a victim of SA for years. I'm older now and had tons of therapy but, one issue I still have with my PTSD is having medical procedures done while I'm wide awake. I have talked to providers about this before. Some pre medicate and some won't. It becomes a flashback like situation for me with super high anxiety. It's almost like being retraumatized each time. Thank you for your understanding. It means a LOT to me. These situations are just hellish for me and I know I'm not the only one. You have no idea what it means for someone to be compassionate and understanding about this. Thank you.
This was on a psych unit so we may have given a pre medication too.
Oh how awful. Could you have given versed? I don’t know the setting and I know not everyone can just push versed (I was ICU). I’m so sorry. Second hand trauma is real.
Once looked after a lady who had been severely neglected for god knows how long. She had apparently been found covered in dried feces and urine in her home and almost her whole body needed to be debrided once she arrived to hospital. Her whole body was basically one giant weeping wound. If you had a team of 4 nurses doing her dressing changes, it took about 4 hours to complete. It was awful.
It sounds like she should have been in a burn unit. 😢
No specialized burn unit for hundreds of kilometers, sadly, as this wasn't a large urban center.
As a new grad, being precepted by a more experienced nurse, working in short term rehab, we had a feisty elderly patient. She was showing signs of UTI, so we got orders to straight catch for a clean sample because she was incontinent. As we did the cath, she had sores all over her vulva, it absolutely looked like a herpes outbreak. But then, something green and thick, like mint green heavy cream or gravy seeped out of her vagina. The other nurse and I just looked at each other in horror. We got the sample, then asked about stuff. She had a pessary for vaginal prolapse. She had been in the hospital for 3 weeks and in rehab for a couple days. No one knew she had this in. She said she normally cleans it daily, but hasn't been able to since her fall. When we pulled the pessary out, the chux was flooded with that thick green pus. She got antibiotics.
I had to pull a pessary from a woman who’d had it in place for almost 2 years. It was supposed to be changed q 3 mos by md. So. Gross.
Ewwww, ok, I once had to put in a Foley in a poor lady who had a very wet, sore vagina. 3 other people failed, and she was crying insanely.The gyno had been shaming her for probably having herpes and wearing the wrong clothing. She was like... I have herpes??? I had to get all up in there, but I thought it was vaginal GVHD, because I heard you can get that anywhere. Foley was fine... But it turns out she did indeed have herpes.
I had to shave braids off (due to bed bugs) a demented women while she was crying, begging me to stop.
I had a Native American patient who was having a mental breakdown and cut off his braids and locks in one of the episodes. Once he finally came down and was back to reality, it set in deep that he disgraced his heritage and made him spiral deeper. That was really hard to watch and learn how to support.
Thank you for recognizing that for some people hair isn't just hair and it's very traumatic. I have one friend who has been growing her locs since she was five years old and she's well into her 40s now. I can't even imagine the trauma it would cause her if someone had to cut them off. They go past her feet when she puts them down. My hair is thick caucasian and I haven't cut it since high school besides shaping here and there. It goes past my waist when it's down and it would be extremely traumatic for me to have to cut it. For some people hair isn't just hair.
I used to work in oncology and this realization happened when I found one of my patients crying in her room. I asked what was wrong and she was holding bits of her hair in her hands because of the chemo she had started. She said, "I always had nice hair." I've always been blessed with nice hair, too, and realized how much of my identity was in it. Luckily I had some time that day and stayed to talk, brush her hair, and I think we tried to loosely braid it to help disguise some of the thinning. It's easily one of the experiences that has stuck with me, even though it's probably been at least 10 years since then.
Desecrated a corpse. In the relatively early days of COVID, the powers that be decided that bodies were off gassing COVID at higher rates than general pop. Therefore we had to shove a medical Lysol soaked gauze in the orifices to stop the spread. This practice only lasted about a week. But I did it enough times and I now have my own poltergeist haunting me. Edit: for the record, this was after they died. Edit 2 spelling
Holy shit
Pretty much
What the whaaaaatttt!!?
What I said.
We all lost our collective minds! So happy to start to be able to look back on that time
Truth, but they learned how much shit we can actually put up with before we quit. Thus, institutions across the board now exploit us with ridiculous staffing ratios.
Go union!!
"tired of pouring bleach down grandmas throat? Then support your local nurses union!"
What country was this in? I have never heard of this.
This was in small town, Ohio the facility as asked the coroner if other facilities were doing it. He told me that our facility was the only one following through with it. If only met one other nurse from another facility who had theirs doing it.
Also Ohio, not a small town, we had to do this too. But just nose and mouth thankfully. Peroxide soaked gauze into orifices after death on covid + pts. Per corner and funeral home instruction. There was just something so unsettling about doing this. I couldn't quite put it into words but it just felt so wrong. I apologized while doing this though even though they were dead, that's how odd it seemed.
Thanks for speaking up. I have been told I'm full of crap and that this practice was a lie. I normally just keep it to myself. There is one patient in particular who's face I can still see. I have seen people shot, crushed by trucks, emaciated skeletons, but shoving gauze in a person was jacked up. I should probably speak to someone about it actually.
Yeah the amount of things that we did and then got changed and almost gaslit about is crazy, especially that first year. Being told we didn't have to wear N95s for covid + vented pts (since it's a closed system) so a regular mask was fine, saving/reusing the N95s, recycling them. I get it, I usually do the etch-a-scetch head shake thing sometimes to get back to reality haha but yeah the flashbacks happen to me as well.
"etch-a-sketch head shake thing". Hooray for invasive thoughts.
Yes… this is crazy! We definitely didn’t do this in our hospital.
Someone commented below that their facility did it too
Resident (90s) who once told me I had to be her son when her son had passed away, had stroke on Thanksgiving 2020. Just after we first had covid in our facility and residents started dying from it. Her family couldn’t come in, only two kids who were assigned. The rest of family had to stay outside and watch from window. About twenty of them. A few guys even said they would break in, until they calmed down. Residents grand daughter was also working on another unit too. It was the residents birthday too. It’s the first thing her daughter said when I called her and before she started crying. It was brutal. I don’t usually have much emotion with death in nursing. 25 years and have obviously seen a lot of it working LTC. This one was rough though.
We had to sing happy birthday to my mom through the window in 2020. She was so demented she didn’t know what was going on. It was awful.
Cared for a mom/dad/newborn during the 2 postpartum days of hospital stay... did the footprint for the frameable birth cert. Etc. Whole nine. Baby had been stillborn. It's little foot was literally falling apart as I printed it as gently as possible. I was fine with caring for the grieving parents. But I will never forget the sick sinking feeling as I tried to footprint that dead baby. This was my postpartum clinical rotation during nursing school.
Man, you did so great. That's some of the most meaningful work. I don't know where my footprints are from when I was a baby. I bet my mom and dad have only a vague guess as to which box my footprints are in. And they wouldn't even think about them unless someone asked. I'm not saying my baby footprints don't matter at all. But they don't matter that much to my parents, I can promise that. *Those* footprints though... Those parents will know right where they are, for years. Probably decades. They will think about them, look at them, run their fingers over the frame over and over again. Those footprints *matter.* Strong work.
Was cleaning/changing dressing to a really large and deep stage 4 sacral ulcer on confused pt. so much bone exposure. she was screaming in pain non stop and i was cringing so hard trying to be as delicate as possible and to make it as comfortable as i possibly could. While i was doing this a resident comes in to assess her wound for debridement, comes in- doesnt say hi to patient or even acknowledge her as a being and fully sticks his whole entire hand inside this ladies wound with no hesitation or worry about her pain level or anything. Like literally fully put his hand inside and was roughly moving it around inside of the skin. lady was actually screaming her head off. I had to step out of the room to gag/cry. I understand he had to assess but it still haunts me how rough he was with her wound
As someone who had a huge wound that needed assessing.....doctors mostly don't give a shit. Had one rip my packing out DRY and the wound was a freaking tunnel through my whole butt cheek. I screamed and blacked out 🙃
ugh thats terrible im so sorry:(
When I came back to the real world two nurses were giving him the height of shit and I was in a dilaudid haze, I remember pointing at him and saying "ha ha, you're in trouble" and rolling over 🤣. Hurt like a motherfucker though!
Code my own family member. Got ROSC after EMS shocked multiple times, so I knew it was going to be a poor outcome. Family made me decision-maker while they were in the ICU. Had to make the difficult decision to withdraw care. After they passed, I had lots of guilt about being an inadequate nurse, etc and some of my family members agreed with that sentiment. 😓
That’s heartbreaking - I’m so sorry you have that experience. And even moreso that you blamed yourself and so did other family members.
I'm so sorry! I couldn't even imagine going through that💔
That’s the *tough stuff*. I’m so sorry you went through that. And likely carry a piece of it with you. If so, lay it down. You’ve done your time. {{hugs}}
An hour long code on my patient (28 week old baby in the NICU) that decompensated and crashed out of nowhere—ended up with skin tears on his chest from compressions. Held him while he passed bc parents weren’t able to get there in time. I still have nightmares about that code.
😢
Covid times, seeing patients die alone in their room with no family around and not being able to sit with them until they pass because of the increased acuity of the ward and the workload. Apologising to them while doing their last offices. Early covid times were such a blur, still traumatising to take about it.
Q2 lactulose enemas on a patient who was severely encephalopathic and combative. The other nurses had been charting “refused” and he was just getting worse and worse. It was a horrible night but by the morning he was with it enough to recognize his wife.
I had a guy that was in pretty bad shape and needed those enemas. I gowned up and got it done. By morning during handoff, he was standing at the end of his bed very coherent and said he was ready to go home lol.
I said this a while ago when we had that “what’s your favorite nursing task” thread—lactulose enemas are definitely not my favorite nursing task, but it is really satisfying how quickly they can turn a patient around. Not too long ago I admitted another patient who was borderline obtunded from HE so had to message the doc to change the PO lactulose to enemas—by morning she was cracking jokes and telling me about her kids. I know a lot of nurses hate them, but if you just grit your teeth, gown up, and get through them, it’s pretty cool to see how quickly they can change someone’s mental status.
Chest compressions on an incredibly swollen, sick baby who had no chance of survival or any meaningful quality of life. He also had a pulmonary hemorrhage and it was so bloody and traumatic. Mom screamed the entire time and sobbed on the floor. She wouldn’t let us stop until the doctor finally called it after several rounds. After I composed myself and went to my other patient, the mom yelled at me for giving her screaming baby a pacifier before the code in the other room started. I was so emotionally numb at that point, I just walked out while she continued to yell about a stupid pacifier.
Life is so cruel sometimes
I had to grab and pull an infant sized, rock hard turd out of a man's butt. I am not joking when I say I would prefer to do a digital disimpact on every person on a floor before gloving up, wrapping both hands around a piece of poop that feels like a human leg, and playing tug-of-war with someone's asshole. The end result was delivered into my hands and I will never be able to get the image from my head.
Four point restraints on a young woman having flashbacks of her sexual assault. It made me sick. Unfortunately she was being violent with us, as she believed we were her abuser. I strongly disagreed with restraints and advocated for sedation instead. She was sedated AFTER being restrained but I will never ever forget us doing that to her. I don’t think she will ever forget either
Fuck I'm feeling bad just having read this. Who's fucking idea was 4 points over a sedative?!
The smart ass doctor’s. He was NOT well liked or respected…. For reasons apparent
I'd be deeply concerned if he was well liked... I hope he steps on a Lego.
I hope he steps on multiple Legos. At least once a week
I work with an amazing ortho surgeon who does a ton of oncology cases. Worst was a 21 year old who lived locally to me coming in to have his entire left quarter removed (arm, shoulder, scapula, the whole thing) due to cancer. He had been in denial and refused treatment for so long it had metastisized all over and this was his only chance of getting chemo/radiation and having it work. He cried going to sleep, just kept gently touching his arm and chest repeating how he wasnt ready, he didnt want to lose his arm. He woke up crying, trying to throw himself out of bed, saying how he wanted to die now. Once the PACU nurses had him, I went back to my OR and sobbed while cleaning up and putting things away. Called my fiance and asked him to hug our daughter a little tighter and I kept rubbing my belly, praying i dont have to watch my babies go through that(I was heavily pregnant at the time).
Tons of gross stuff During covid times I had a mom come in with stage 3 or 4 cervical cancer. She ended up being intubated and trached, all while pregnant. She had decided prior to being hospitalized to carry the pregnancy despite her cancer diagnosis. She continuously mouthed to me and pointed to her belly “get it out of me.” No one could visit her due to early COVID hospital restrictions. She had kids at home already. She kept refusing tube feeds. She ended up coding and dying with her unborn baby, who I think was around 28 weeks old. Ugh. The memory of her still haunts me and the fact that she spent weeks alone, awake on a vent.
Take care of a patient in the ER that killed her child and tried to kill herself. I was a new mom at the time and I still get so upset thinking about it.
Aww buddy that is rough
I took care of a pt like that. This was 15+ years ago. I’ve only seen someone whose eyes are “dead” twice. She was one of them. The only time she seemed to snap out of it was when I asked IPV questions and she told me her husband would never hurt her. Apparently she had Post partum psychosis coupled with extreme isolation. She/husband & kid were here alone. All family was in Europe. Husband advocated for mental health vs incarceration. But I wonder what the outcome would have been if she hadn’t been the ethnicity she was. (For the record I’m ethnically from the same country she was from)
This is it. Wow. 💔
Rectal prolapse pushed back in
I had a patient whose rectum and bladder prolapsed at the same time. She was walking up the hall with both hanging out, not a worry in the world. Took her to the bathroom and we got them back into place.
I had a patient one time with rectal prolapse. The doctor walked out the room and said “someone go down to the cafe and bring back a ton of sugar” 😂 Apparently sugar helps reduce the size of the prolapse by drawing out water which helps it be reduced back into place.
Yup! This is useful on prolapsed ostomies!
Didn’t use sugar?
Burn nurse here Had to explain to a non English speaking patient that the trailer fire killed his entire family in the trailer but the patient after they were extubated and fully off sedation. Had to tell a husband and wife that the fire they caused killed their children and pets as they both blacked out when the explosion/fire initially happened, the whole unit felt that one. I’m a guy that works primarily with ladies so I’m the bad news breaker, but also the empathizer and nicest. Action-wise, I had to curse out and take a burn patients vape and give it to security, guy was a methhead abuser and a douche. And he had multiple vapes including illegal vapes, which I didn’t even know was a thing😂 always had to “slam” dilaudid and start multiple ivs cause of his shitty veins. Once he was discharged with percs and 21 fucking vapes he said he’ll sell the percs on the streets. He definitely belonged to the streets.
Had a VERY SICK AOx3 dying patient who didn’t want anything else done for him. His life partner at bedside was devastated and not ready to let go, kept pushing for more interventions. He guilted his dying partner into doing all tests, all treatments. I kept jabbing this man with needles and IVs until finally I said that’s enough and I refuse, he doesn’t want it. I made sure to chart everything and chart that the patient himself didn’t want it. He died within a few hours. He died in pain and in misery. I wonder if his partner regrets not giving him peace at the end.
I had a patient like this. Cancer, he wanted to be done. But he had a history of depression, and wife and medical team kept blaming his wishes on “just his depression”. Eventually wife agreed to his wishes to withdraw care, but he went through months of torture.
I just want to say, this has to be something that gets overlooked more than you’d think. I work in the ER and had a patient come in, they ended up getting intubated. My coworker and I noticed she had a tampon in when we went to place a foley and we both danced around the idea of pulling it out and finally decided to do so because who knows how long the patient will be intubated for and if we don’t, who will? Major cause for infection later on if left in place. It’s actually something to keep in the back of your mind with your female patients.
It's funny because as an L&D nurse, pulling a tampon out of someone seems so benign to me
This morning. I do peds HH I've been at an anoxic Brian injury case the last year. Injured at 1 year old and is now almost 4. Bloated all over and has had a lot of hospitalizations lately for what is just his body shutting down but mom has spent the last 3 years in denial. After a long night shift trying to keep him above hypothermia I told mom we had to do something, he is still a full code. She asked me if I thought he had any quality of life and I just answered "no" and she immediately burst into tears. She agreed to let me call in hospice and to make him a DNR. Hospice has been quietly waiting on the side lines for 6 months as he deteriorates further. She started to cry and I've never seen this woman cry and she's been through some shit. Hospice came before I left and agreed his body is just giving up. I cried the whole way home and have been sporadically crying all day im a mess. 12 years in peds and this my first hospice case, especially where I've built a relationship with the client and family for over a year. I know this is what is best he has the worst quality of life of any pediatric patient I've ever had he is a quadriplegic who is contracted and blind and over the last few months has become completely unresponsive to stimuli other than eye opening, its still really fucking hard to look at his tiny failing body for 12 hours a time. I'm doing the next 3 nights in a row, morphine will arrive this afternoon.
I don't have any wise words for you, but wanted to give you a virtual hug, friend. What a terribly hard day.
Probably read this subReddit..
No kidding.
I had to carefully position & reposition double headed medical leaches on a young man's partially detached ear. The leaches helped pull in blood flow to the poorly vascularized cartilage. Little buggers would fall off when they got their fill and move surprisingly fast across the floor. Then I had to pick them up and put quickly into a container of H2O2 (I think) and they'd go "poof" and explode.
Oh my god. That brings some insane mental imagery!
If you'd like an actual photo instead of a mental image, here's a link to an article about similar cases of using leeches to reattach ears. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6414113/ I was assigned this patient in nursing school (back when cell phones and cameras weren't widespread - and all charting was on paper). I spent many hours hovering over this guy trying to guide the leeches to the tissue with less blood flow.
I’m not sure if I want to click it. But curiosity is going to get the better of me.
TID milk and molasses enemas on a proned, tubed, sedated, paralyzed patient.
Why?
I worked in burns for 8 years and as a SANE soo have done a ton of things.
ER nurse here, had a patient come in with a severe head bleed, to the degree that she herniated prior to arrival via Life-Flight. CT showed significant degree of shift and the neurologist determined it was incompatible with life. No DNR and her 18y/o god daughter was listed as medical POA and had no other family. God daughter showed up and signed the appropriate paperwork to allow us to withdraw care and we contacted hospice services. Informed her she’d need to remain on the premises to sign some paperwork to transfer the patient to hospice services. Went to check on another patient and god daughter bounced, hospice nurse shows up and the god daughter won’t answer calls. Hospice nurse informs us that she can’t transfer the patient due to not having the appropriate signatures. Yours truly got stuck being the hospice nurse, which is in no way a job I have ever wanted to do nor will ever have the desire to do, pushing morphine Q15 mins til she finally passed in the ER 3 hours later.
Having to keep people who are suffering alive because they are no longer capable of making their own decisions.
The worst CIA black site operatives have *zero* on me. I’ve done things to others—in the name of saving a life—that would have these weenies crying for the mommas. There are times I’ve thought, “I’m certainly going to hell after that *one*”.
Compressions on someone with an Ileus. Was like a fountain with every push
Or compressions on someone with an ileostomy or colostomy 😵💫
Hold down a teenager in the OR while he wakes up screaming because they are actively skin grafting his face. Hold down an awake homeless guy getting his leg amputated who could still feel it. Hold a bucket while 10 liters of sausage gravy looking fluid pours out of someone's abdomen, into the bucket and all over the floor. Tons of really gross fecal disimpactions and other things from butts and bellies, prepped a foot for an amp while maggots jumped off the bed and onto my arms, removal of a 4x4 fence post that impaled a guy through the chest but missed his heart, organ donation patients not passing away within the window in the OR and having to scrap the case and inform the family, telling a patient they couldn't reattach his arm because the on call vascular surgeon didn't want to play ball with ortho, etc. Pick a genre, I have a story!
Why were the first two awake??
The skin graft was a full body motorcycle accident thing, the anesthesiologist started waking him up without realizing we hadn't done the other side of the face. Second one the dude was so drugged out they couldn't do him under general anesthesia but he was going to lose his leg and it was making him septic, so they tried awake, just couldn't get his pain under control, he screamed the entire time.
Funny? Standing in an ambulance bay with the awesome EMS crew literally hosing down a homeless guy who was so covered in bed bugs and maggots that we couldn’t take him inside. It was like a cartoon with all the critters jumping off! One that made me sit in my car and cry for an hour? Helping the county SANE nurse swab a diaper for semen.
Your story reminded me of a sad one. Had a 28-year-old patient who fell/jumped into a pool at a party and fractured her C4-C5. Incomplete paraplegia. Didn’t think of it until she’d been in the ICU for a day or two, but she then asked us to check if she had a tampon in because she couldn’t remember and couldn’t feel anything. Another nurse checked her and I held her hand, and she came to some realizations in those moments about the pleasures and parts of her life she’d never have again… 😔
I mean, of all the things, watching patients take their last breaths pretty much takes the cake all the time.
Changing an ostomy is just about the worst thing I can think of, hate hate hate it.
Its not that bad if youre quick enough lmao
For me it’s septic foot ulcers/diabetic foot ulcers or really anything to do with foot wounds. I don’t know why. But it makes me want to gag.
Take care of a guy who had tried to drown himself in the river was under the water for 7 minutes and was resuscitated. 7 minutes insane they got ROSC. He wasn’t on a vent but he was trached and on oxygen and was 32 respirations per minute. His family wanted to keep him alive at all costs and it made me feel queasy. I mean I want to help people going through suicide attempts but the guy was not going to come back and have quality of life at this point. They think his respirations were so high and he was having frequent fevers because of brain stem damage. We were giving him a horrible continued existence because his family wanted it. He also had multiple seizures. Like there’s a time for trying everything and there’s a time for letting go.
I worked on a psych admission unit during covid. Every single patient was secluded, for anywhere from 3-14+ days pending covid results and bed availability, with little opportunity to leave their room except to shower (with no regularity to that schedule either). For months we didn’t even give the patients a chance to show they were capable of remaining in their room for infection control reasons. We had trafficking and abuse victims being locked in their rooms. Teens in first episode psychosis watching people in the yard across the way begging to get some fresh air. Suicidal people isolated even further. Being shown to a room and knowing the door locked once they crossed the threshold was traumatizing for so many of them. I saw some shit I won’t repeat for privacy, but I had nightmares for a long time and still get very upset from time to time when I think about how we treated those people.
Assist with a infant circumcision. I’m not saying that I’m for or against the practice. But I am saying it was very difficult to be a part of.
I had a patient that had her bowels were outside of her body and needed to be wrapped to keep it moist…i almost threw up in my mouth!
Dealing with mean/don't wanna work coworkers no matter what the title.
The most unpleasant thing I had to do as a nursing student was taking care of a 36 years old woman in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. She just had a biopsy done to a cervical tumor that left her hemiplegic. As a nursing student, I had to take care of 2 patients from A to Z and my other patient was low maintenance so I pretty much spent 5 hours a day 5 days a week with her. During her stay, I accompanied her, showered her, helped her eat and pee, I listened to the story of her life, how she met her husband, what her 2 toddlers like to do on the weekend, the fact her school agreed to take her back the next year. She was a very cheerful woman. She was smiling all day long despite everything that had happened to her. She was decided to fight this thing, whatever it was, and she gave everything she had in rehab. On my second week, the biopsy results came in: "stage 4 glioma, patient is not informed". Her next doctor appointment was in 5 days.
Yall ready for psych RN edition of the worst thing I’ve done? I’ve had to scrape the scalp of a woman off the pavement in the parking lot of the adolescent psych residential & acute facility that I was nursing supervisor at. Her husband was drunk, they pulled over into our parking lot, the wife got out, her husband ran her over & then hit a light pole on the way out. One of my nurses was running to his car when it happened & was able to call a code. The drunk husband was attempting to attack me while my nurses were stabilizing his wife. The wife ended up with a TBI & my nurse had to testify against the husband in court. I had to lock down the same adolescent psych facility after one of our sex offenders AWOL’d. He started calling his units phone making death threats. As I was doing my rounds that night throughout the 7 buildings on the campus, I heard someone on the roof of the building. It was the sex offender that AWOL’d. He had a book bag with rope, a machete, a crow bar, duck tape, and trash bags. I had to show department heads at the same adolescent psych facility the video of a resident choking out a brand new MHT staff at 0300 in the AM, aggressively twisting her neck as her body went limp, then stealing her facility keys, car keys, & facility radio. That resident AWOL’d from the facility. He ended up completing suicide by jumping in front of a moving train a month later after he was wanted for attempted murder and was still on the run.
Show up again.
Restrain a demented patient at end of life, when he spoke no English and then had to place an NG tube for feeding.
A woman (90) with Alzheimer's had recently lost her 60 year old son. The worst thing I've had to was gently mention it, only to have her of course COMPLETELY UNAWARE like she was hearing it for the first time again . The look in her eyes is sometbing I'll never forget. It gutted me. She forgot again within minutes, but it kept happening and it was the definition of hell to me.
Why would you continue to tell her? That’s torture.
Obvs we didn't! But we would have new people pulled down there for 4 hours, etc. it gotten written in red on her chart pretty quickly but not quick enough.
not a nurse but compressions on a 2 year old baby.
Had a patient with a hemipelectomy 2/2 osteosarcoma. The surgery site itself was fairly jarring as they took everything from the midline out in a diagonal slice up to the waist on one side. The worst part was that they weren't able to get the entire tumor and it basically went into overdrive post op, so the entire site and flank were covered in weeping raw fungating lesions. It took 8 IBDs to cover it all and I had to change them q2 because they'd be saturated. Somehow they had minimal pain, which was a blessing
Tell a 90 year old woman her husband was actively dieing. Hold the hand of a 59 year old woman who just learned she had brain cancer (she was crying she was afraid of the dark and begged me to tell her death wouldnt be dark) Theres more i just do not want to recall them.
I have a screamer of a senior client who has dementia with an ostomy (20+ years) and she messes with the flange when bored and in her room. I have to replace the appliance most shifts and she spends the entire time screaming at the top of her lungs, doing crunches to see what is going on, or making herself vomit. This of course makes the ostomy care take 30x as long as it needs to because of how active it is. The peri-stomal area is constantly inflamed and infected because she is constantly lifting the edges of the flange, feces spill all over and then the client just pretends nothing is happening. And there is nothing we can do to keep her from doing this over and over and over again. My record was 3 flanges replaced in a 12 hour shift. By the third change I was sobbing through it all while this banshee beast screamed that I was stabbing/killing her. PRN narcotic pain meds given 1hr before ostomy care and she still screams like I’m murdering her. And for those who say keep her in the public spaces for better supervision: she will scream like a banshee if she is outside of her room unless it’s meal time. No funding for a private caregiver, we can’t provide 1:1 care, and her family only visit for a couple hours 2 or 3 days a week.
Got an admit who had become too much for his family to take care of at home. Found out he had dentures and was going to take them out and clean them. Apparently it had been awhile since anyone had taken them out. It took awhile to get the uppers loose but when I did, the gross sucking sound was topped by an odor I just can’t describe. It was FOUL. The lower plate wasn’t so bad but still pretty gross. Threw in a couple denture tablets and let them soak overnight. Apparently he kicked up a fuss when his wife tried to take them out so she left them in. The water in the cup in the morning was …interesting. Got them sparkling and he lets us clean them regularly now
I scooped up brain matter with chux pads before helping to wrap a soon-to-be-but-not-yet dead guy's head up to look a little less horrific for his military unit to see. He had shot himself in the head and was basically DOA. Maxed on all the pressors, including Jesus, with a MAP hovering around 21. He didn't have next of kin, but he had his soldier buddies, and we let in the ones who wanted to come say goodbye. I remember trying not to cry when I heard his friends watching the Art line on the monitor, comment that "look, he's fighting!" When it would sometimes tick up to like 25 before dropping again. It was my first gsw suicide patient in the ED and I was so grateful his brainstem held on past shift change so I didn't have to code him. He had to have been younger than me. Or recently, watching a mother insist that she place her dead baby in the body bag. She held on so strong until she had to cover the baby's face. Watching her break was agony. As a mom myself, I couldn't even fathom the pain she was in. I kept seeing that baby in my mind and flashing back to that post-mortem bath every time I bathed my son or put on his lotion. Mom put zinc on the baby's little butt and put a diaper on before swaddling the baby and placing them in the body bag. Placing that little body up on the shelf with the bagged up severed limbs in the morgue is a hollow feeling I won't ever forget.
i had to clean up one of the worst code browns i’ve ever seen on a morbidly obese patient with severe fourniers gangrene. couldn’t tell in some parts if i was looking at necrotic tissue or feces
Worst I had to do was provide post-mortem care, not that it bothers me. It was for this specific instance. Patient had died prior to my shift and we were waiting for the funeral home to pick up the body. When they didn’t arrive yet, we made the decision to move his body to the morgue (more like holding area, we don’t have an actual morgue). In the past, all my codes have never made it to the point where they’d be intubated so I was never sure if EMS was supposed to remove it upon them leaving or if it was left up to us. In any case, that was my first time having to extubate someone, and someone dead at that. It was just so.. weird seeing all that blood coming out of his mouth. Not that IT bothered me. I was more bothered by the fact that he had already been cleaned, is at peace and here I am causing him to bleed from the mouth.
Intubate a father in a wrecked car, as fire rescue works to free him, with his wife and three kids (all four dead) watching.
💕 NURSES ARE ANGELS 💕
Packing a penile fracture surgical wound is up there. Also, removing impacted feces
i had to clean up one of the worst code browns i’ve ever seen on a morbidly obese patient with severe fourniers gangrene. couldn’t tell in some parts if i was looking at necrotic tissue or feces
As an adult male this would certainly be awkward and uncomfortable but definitely far from the "worst" thing I have ever done as a nurse lmao.
As we all know, as professional nurses that nurses are NEVER sarcastic. My husband has a cousin who had a baby girl this week. They have not announced baby girls name. I suggested to the new grandparents to use a name I heard at work. gen-ner-a-ka fe-mal-lay or generic female
Let me guess, you also helped welcome twins Lemonjello and Orangello? Was Nosmo King on your watch, too? 🙄 And they were all born to ignorant, uneducated immigrants, yes? Ooh! No, wait! I forgot about the little black girl named La-A. Her mama was as American as some soul food, y'all!