What Is Your Most Gross, Yucky, Disgusting Nursing Horror Story?

We've been having out-of-control poop on our unit.
One pt pooped all over the floor. I mean ALL OVER. The pt was also coated... I mean COATED with it.
Me and a coworker scrub up the pt, scrubbed up the floor. I mean, it was one of those poops where you just don't know where to start!! A sea o' poo...
This was not an easy task, considering the pt was combative and the stench was crazy!
We were patting ourselves on the back for getting that job done and went to close the door behind us.
When we shut it, we streaked a large swath of poop across the floor and outside the pt's room.
Apparently there was a rather large pasty turd stuck under the door itself that we didn't see while the door was open.
It was so stupid, after all that hard work we just did that we just looked at each other and burst out laughing, doubled over until we cried.
Nobody truly understood what the heck we thought was so darn funny about poo. And the non-clinical staff were wretching, which made us laugh harder.
Gawd, I'm sick!

I've been a nurse for less then a year. On my first post grad rotation I met a guy who suffered the most horrific death I have EVER seen.

Long story short, he was a chronic smoker and even after a trachy he would still smoke! He was non-compliant with meds and was DNA to a lot of his treatments. So it didn't surprise anyone when the tumour returned. It got so big that he ended up with a hole in his neck the size of good sized man's fist. Again, he cont to be noncomplaint and DNA.

Anyway, he ended up on our ward basically too die (it was bad situation because A&E sent him to us instead of getting hospice involved). His tumour had infiltrated his carotid and jugular and so he bled and bled and basically ended up bleeding to death out of his mouth, nose, and throat hole, not only that the tissues affected by the tumour were rotting and dead, and so he smelt like a corspe and he would just puke so much blood.

It was horrific to watch, horrific to smell and even the senior nurse had to take leave from his care cos she couldn't handle the whole thing. I've got a pretty stern stomach but even this had me breathing through my mouth - even though I could taste it!!

But it did prove our Reg and House Suregons were wonderful doctors as they came up and stayed with him as he got sicker and sicker. The man ended up passing on the night shift (I worked the PM).

Then I saw infected gout. Like gout that was so bad the doctors got all excited because it was "so text book", it had all the little crystals and it stunk. I was told by a senior nurse "go do his dressings" and I was like "AWESOME! I get to see infected gout". Of course, I didn't know what infected gout looked or SMELT like.

I had to tell the pt half way through thedressing I bought the wrong kind of guaze and I went out into the corridor and asked my senior nurse if I could take an anti-emetic cos I wanted to hurl! So I went back and continued the dressing and then the pt says to me "hey, watch this" and he pushes one of his gouty nodules on the table and it literally exploded with cyrstals and pus and God only knows what else, and it squirted along the bench, hit the curtain and basically stunk out the whole six bed room. Then a pt in the window bed said "Man, who farted!" then I heard him vomit!

The smell was just THAT bad.

Another time I saw a friend carrying what I thought was crunchy peanut butter, which I thought was weird to carry that in a jug. It wasn't. It was infected bile.