Share Your Funniest Patient Stories...

[Trvln Nurse]

We all have lots of stories to tell. I thought it would be fun if we shared a few of our funniest patient stories with each other.

Here's mine...

I keep remembering a particular incident a few years back. It wasn't even my patient.

I was heading down the hallway on the CCU unit in which I worked. I was minding my own business, heading down the hallway and I just happened to glance into a patient room...

I couldn't believe what I saw...

An older gentleman, who clearly was having some post-op dementia after open heart surgery....

he was sitting up in the middle of his bed and with knees bent and feet braced at the bed rail for extra support....

With both hands...

HE WAS PULLING on all of his CHEST TUBES with ALL OF HIS MIGHT!!!

Needless to say, I sprang into action along with all the surrounding nursing staff. It took security along with all of us to restrain this man so he wouldn't hurt himself. Though it wasn't funny at the time....I can't get this picture out of my mind and find it amusing to remember.

What's your story?

[EDNewbie]

We had a 60ish female in ER with a rectal prolapse secondary to long-term laxative abuse. This thing was HUGE- I'm talking softball-sized. Evidently her sphincter had no tone; every time the ER doc reduced it, it popped back out and swelled up more. ER doc consults with surgeon, who says, you have to shrink it before you push it back in. How do we do that? Pack it with SUGAR...yes, that's right plain old granulated sugar (the theory being that the osmotic action will draw out the edema). Well, needless to say, I had never done this before (by accident or on purpose) and for a while I thought the ER doc was trying to pull one over one me (he's a known jokester). But no, another RN and I spent the next 2 hours opening those tiny sugar packets (of course, that's the only sugar we could find), pouring them into styrofoam cups and alternately sprinkling, sifting and packing this poor lady's rectum with sugar. Of course this pt is also diabetic, so we have to do Accucheck's q 30 mins (rectal mucosa absorbs the sugar, evidently). Finally, the prolapse shrinks enough, the doc decides to reduce it again. So myself, the other RN and the doc go in, and each time the doc tries to fix it, the pt bears against it and pushes it back out. So I grab the silk tape and tell the doc, on the count of 3... He pushes it back in, the other nurse clamps the cheeks together, and I wrap her butt in silk tape. Without a doubt, this was the most BIZARRE thing I had ever witnessed or done. I swear, this is true, I couldn't make this up! Oh, BTW, pt was admitted for surgery the next morning. Called report to the floor, told the entire story then the nurse asks,

Do you have an order to tape her butt cheeks? What the ??????

:chuckle

[DirtRoads]

:rotfl: lol lol lol!!![quote=curlyfries]just before a new nurse graduate lifted a patient's gown to give an insulin injection, she said to the older gentleman, "there'll be a little prick" the 89 year old man, with a twinkle in his eye, returned, "oh, so you are a psychic, as well as a nurse!"

[nursetrese]

I was a nursing student when this little man asked me to put him on the bed pan.. so I did this with ease and told him I would return...to this day I still dont know why the hell I put both side rails down to remove him from the bed pan... I gently push him on his side all the while saying " a little farther,,,a little farther......until you guessed it.....I pushed him right off the other side.... immediately I panicked and thought about running out of the room.....( I could see my licence being ripped apart).. as I am heading for the door he yells out " Teresa help me up" omg now he knows who i am......so I go back to the bed and put both side rails up.... Then I go to the other side of the bed where the patient is on the floor and as god as my witness I scream the loudest scream of my life when I looked down on the floor and saw this little naked man with no legs...........I screamed " where are your legs"""" and he screamed " Vietnam""" I swear to god I thought I broke them both off in the fall.......then the teacher comes walking in... sees the patient on the floor,,, both side rails up and says " what happened here"? I looked her straight in the eye and said " you know how double amputees are? they are wiggley..... I think he wiggled through the bars....... yes I said it....

[SaraO'Hara]

Ahahahaha! That gives me the most hilarious mental images you can imagine!

[jen620]

Too funny! The first time I experienced a prolapsed uterus was in my first few weeks of being a nurse aide... my co-workers told me (with the straightest faces) that the woman had a member. I almost quit after that....:roll

[hipab4hands]

I had 2 "sundowners".

#1 patient insisted that that here were kittens running all over the unit and sometimes, at 2 or 3 in the morning, you would hear her calling, "Here kitty, kitty."

#2 patient was in her late 80's. Every evening, her high school "boyfriend" would make an "appearance" in her room. The patient would insist that "Al" was in the room with her, but staff couldn't let her father know, because she wasn't allowed to have male visitors.

[organichombre, ADN, BSN, MSN, LPN, RN]

This was not funny at the time for me but the rest of the shift got a big laugh. I was a new LPN working for an agency at a nursing home. We had an AA female who was schizophrenic and needed an in/out cath q6 for 2 days. On the night shift of course, so I was kinda leery about it from the start. I walked into her room from the hallway which was dimly lit, into pitch black nothingness. I groped around for the light for what seemed an eternity. Finally I found it, and as I turned back towards the room the patient was standing not 6 inches from my face! I bout died! But, I did the i/o cath w/o incidence.

[organichombre, ADN, BSN, MSN, LPN, RN]

Got another one! I was one of only two or 3 men on one night at the hospital I've worked at for 20 years. I was called to our miniscule ER at the time to help find a AA pt that had escaped but was supposedly somewhere on the 2nd floor, radiology area. A security guard and my self found him hiding in a closet and of course he was naked! He was headed to psych (surprise, surprise!). We got on the elevator and as soon as the door closed he punched the security guard knocking him to the floor. Instinctively I jumped on him to prevent any further injuries to either us or him! They had phoned ahead to psych that we were on the way, so when the doors open, here I am holding down a quite large naked black man, which as you can imagine was quite a sight!:rotfl:

[dawnb70]

I am an LPN working in a Long Term Care Facility. Something funny happens everyday it seems. But there are a couple incidents that will stick with me forever! My first week on the job, fresh out of school, I had to change a foley catheter on a man. A short time after I had changed it he started hollering, "My noodle's over my nubbin'." He yelled it over and over, and I didn't have a clue what he was so upset about. He would often sing and yell throughout the night, so that wasn't anything new. After it went on for several minutes I thought I should go and investigate. Well, it turned out that I had forgotten to retract the foreskin when I was done. The poor man was in a lot of discomfort. I immediately corrected the situation, but I had to laugh at my own stupidity later!! And now I know what "my noodle's over my nubbin'" means!

Another funny story....one of my male residents wheeled up to me in his wheelchair and asked me where the hen house was. I told him that I didn't know where it was, and asked him why he needed to go to the hen house. He said "to wet my noodle". Once again I was drawing a blank about what he was meaning. I thought maybe he needed to urinate. So I simply reiterated, "You want to wet your noodle?". "Yes", he said, "and how much do you charge?" I nearly lost it on the spot!! I have never been mistaken for a prostitute before!! It's the funny things that happen at work that make it all worthwhile sometimes!!

[Dan.Ed]

psychiatric unit 15 years ago.... staff had not had good crisis training. A young bipolar woman was combative and someone called a code security. By the time all of the staff had caught up with the lady she was in the door way to her room trying to take out as many staff as she could with her feet. (She actually knew karate) Because she was standing in the doorway staff could get in front of her and behind her , but not to her sides... Someone yelled "get her feet". A security guard bent over and grabbed hold of one leg and began tugging trying to get her on her back on the floor. Unfortunately the leg he grabbed belonged to the charge nurse who fell to the floor with her feet over her head and her skirt 'up to there", as she fell she was holding on to the pt who also fell, as the patient fell everybody who was holding onto her lost their balance and fell, too. But as we all lay in the floor struggling nobody let go of any body part they were holding on to... the security guard still had the charge nurse by the leg, who by this time was shouting "let go of me" and struggling for all she was worth. I tried to dislodge the security guard from the charge nurse, but he thought my hands on him belonged to the patient so he started twisting the charge nurse's leg. everybody starting screaming and yelling and the patient finally calmed down ( I think because it was becoming apparent to even a bipolar person that someone was getting ready to break something on somebody real soon). When it was finally over the charge nurse could barely walk ; I felt like I'd been dragged by a truck, and everybody else was scraped up and pitiful --- but I still couldn't stop laughing.. dan

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

this happened a quarter century or so ago, when we weren't as "civilized" as we are now . . . .

i was working on a med-surg unit in a very famous east coast hospital. many of our patients had etoh problems, and dts were common. in those days, we gave paraldehyde. for those who have never encountered it, it's a nasty substance that smells (and tastes, so i'm told) very much like formaldehyde. if you left it in a styrofoam cup, it would eat through the styrofoam. you mixed it in juice to disguise the taste as much as possible, and then tried to get the patient to swallow it as quickly as possible. not surprisingly, most of them weren't interested in swallowing the stuff! i can remember chasing the patient around the unit, begging them to take their paraldehyde.

it wasn't my patient, but one old guy freaked out at the thought of swallowing the stuff, and began throwing furniture and medical supplies around. it was nighttime; there were only two of us there for 15 patients -- me (the rn) and an lpn named bill. bill and the medical resident were in the room trying to calm the guy down, and i called security and the nursing supervisor for help. eventually, we had two security guys, the nursing supervisor, the r1, the r3 and bill and me to deal with this guy. the nursing supervisor and the r3 devised a plan -- bill, the security guards, the r3 and i would jump the guy and when we had him subdued, the r1 (who was the smallest of us) would inject him with a healthy dose of im librium. the nursing supervisor would supervise.

things didn't go entirely as planned. we all piled on the guy, and somehow all of us ended up on the floor with me on the bottom. i could barely breathe as everyone was piled on top, struggling, but i didn't have the worst of the deal. i could hear bill yelling and cursing "not that arm, you idiot. not that arm!" as the r1 first alcoholed, then injected the hefty im dose of librium into the first bare masculine arm she encountered . . . bill's. "ok," the r1 said. "i'm done." and everyone piled off leaving bill, the patient and me on the floor. bill was bloody from the injection, and the patient seemed to have gotten some religion because he was profoundly apologetic and cooperative for the rest of the night. (even took his paraldehyde). the r1 never lived down the mistake, but bill recovered and the patient went home, only to come back and dt again.

[iluvjesus]

These storys are all to funny...I could write a book on some of the things that has happened over the yrs that I have been working in a nursing home.... we had this male patient and he looked at me and my co-worker and said "the same darn two eveytime"...

We also had this 100yr old lady who maybe weighed 90lbs her and this other res. were fighting and she told that res. meet me here in the mooring and I will take care of you...the funny thing about this is that the other res was twice her size...

I also had this res. one time that walked w/a cane he looked at me and said dont mess w/the stick and the stick wont mess with you..