What freaks you out?

I've worshipped the god of porcelin 2x in my 20 yrs. of nursing...
Once I had to do oral care on a mouth breather & the secretions were so dried on the roof of his mouth that I practically had to use a jackhammer to remove it all.eeeeewwwww the odor was so horrendous I ran to the sink &...Luckily he was the only pt. in the room & he was confused & had no clue as to what I was doing in his sink!
Then the vomit thing...It brings me to my knees every time.It's the re-eh-eh-ehtching,& more re-eh-eh-eh-eh-tching that makes me stop,drop&heeeeeeeve!

kday, Brenda Braun, & NiteOwl: I howled laughing when I read your posts!!!!!! This is the BEST post/subject I've read here in months!

Okay guys I'm an OB/Gyn 7 peds nurse with past experience in geriatrics. old people pee, poop, 7 Sputum are gross but have you ever done a vag exam and came out with a hand full of cottage cheese as a prize????
Or how about rotovirus in a kid's poop. Guaranteed to make you heave!!!!

Two things I have seen so far have really grossed me out: one is a lady who was found down in her home. She had a open wound to her abdomen that she wasn't taking care of, and when you would touch it (I wouldn't) maggots would fall out. We would have to flush it with saline, and they would just pore into the basin. Let me just say that I couldn't eat rice for a long time! The other one was this lady that had PID. I escorted the MD with the pelvic exam, and when he pull the swab, it had a ton of slimy, smelly green stuff on it. The MD vomited, and I had to stick my head out of the window for some air! Seriously, how do these people walk around with those kind of smells? The MD and I wondered to each other how the husband could even go there without losing it.

This happened to a RT friend of mine. He went to a patient's home who was on home O2 and needed percussion. He said the patient would hack and cough up this thick, green, nasty sputum and spit it into an old coffee can by her chair. During the visit, he was sitting by the patient talking to her, getting ready to leave when he heard this "slurping" sound. He looked down, and her dog was eating that nasty stuff out of the coffee can!!! He said he horked up his lunch right there in the lady's living room!
It's his favorite story and I get queasy EVERY time he tells it!

As a nursing student, I am proud to say that I have been handle the gross stuff much better than I thought I would. The one time I came really close to losing it, was helping a nurse with a stage four, infected pressure ulcer.It was a teenager who was paralyzed. His friends would carry him down three flights of stairs the car several times a day. He was very thin and eventually the skin over his hips opened up. Well, to make a long story even longer, he wasn't very clean. When he came in he had poop all over his wounds. Lovely smell! But when the nurse was poking around in the wounds with those really long q-tips and stuffing about 3 rolls of Kurlex in each pressure sore...I thought I was going down for the count!

That's it.I can't read no more of these posts! That dog thing just did me in... Someone PLEASE come help me.....................................Only kidding. Seriously, I think I would have left nursing if I saw that one.

I also get really freaked out with ortho cases especially when they are drilling the pins in someones leg.UKKKKKKKKKK, I could just vomitt

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Cletus,
That cottage cheese thing did me in!!! UGHHHH
I might think twice about OB nursing now!

O my-she watched you with her other eye???? o-my, o-my...I can handle most anything and keep a game face but cerumen is the worst for me...I hate to touch anyone's ear-even members of my own family....Maggots in open wounds are a bit of a challenge to me I will admit-even if they were put there for the purpose of debridement....yuch....This thread is a hoot-when I read about the dog slurping the lugies up and the PID lady I was done...but like any true nurse-got to go get dinner ready.......no problem...tee hee.But-on the serious side all of the disgusting experiences I have had helped alot when I had to take care of my mom-she died of squamos cell ca of the vulva-which was necrotic by the time she was staged and started treatment-with all she went thru she never lost her sense of humor.The poor thing had a supra pubic cath,a colostomy(an "innie" because the stoma rotted off post-op) and a really foul open wound from her rectum to who knows where-foul drainage which required a lot of packing...before her many surgeries she would joke about sticking post-it notes to the docs on her thighs....

[This message has been edited by ktwlpn (edited March 17, 2001).]

[This message has been edited by ktwlpn (edited March 17, 2001).]