Color challenged male in nursing

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:confused:I curious as to if there are any men out there who are color blind. I have inherited Red-Green color blindness and I am concerned that I will miss important assessment items...for example: green stool; yellow necrotic tissue; red/pink urine; green/yellow sputum.

Anyone experiencing this?

THanks!

Sterlink

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Specializes in Med-Surg, ER.
:confused:I curious as to if there are any men out there who are color blind. I have inherited Red-Green color blindness and I am concerned that I will miss important assessment items...for example: green stool; yellow necrotic tissue; red/pink urine; green/yellow sputum.

Anyone experiencing this?

THanks!

Sterlink

First of all, are you truly colorblind, or do you just have trouble distinguishing shades of colors? I am colorblind in that I fail the Ishahara tests (those little tests with all the dots where you're supposed to see

numbers) and it's always a great source of amusement to those present;

however, I certainly can tell the difference between red/green/yellow.

Mine is more of a subtlety issue. The only time that I've noticed a problem is that I sometimes have difficulty determining if there is a slight change on a hemoccult slide, but if I'm not sure, I just show it to someone else and ask if they see anything. No one has ever thought twice about it.

I would think that the first thing for you to do would be to quantify your degree of colorblindness. Can you tell the difference between red and green on a stoplight? If not, then you'll definitely need to carefully determine what you'll be able to see or not. If it's very subtle, I would focus on learning what these things look like *to you* and assessing appropriately.

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Specializes in ED, ICU, Heme/Onc.
:confused:I curious as to if there are any men out there who are color blind. I have inherited Red-Green color blindness and I am concerned that I will miss important assessment items...for example: green stool; yellow necrotic tissue; red/pink urine; green/yellow sputum.

Anyone experiencing this?

THanks!

Sterlink

Some of these things you'll be able to use other senses for (you never forget the smell of a necrotic ulcer or a GI bleed)- and you are never alone. Asking a coworker to be a second pair of eyes happens often even when the primary nurse has no deficit.

Good luck!

Blee

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I used to work with a nurse who was color blind--oh my god, the color combinations of scrubs he used to wear to work. He'd walk in, we'd bust a gut, and he'd be like, "No way, I did it again? What dumba** combination am I wearing this time?"

He had no problem telling if blood was blood or something else. If he needed an opinion on a color, he'd just ask one of us. But he rarely had to ask--I think he just knew what blood looked like, so that even if he didn't have the right "color" he still could identify it. Same with other secretions.

He was a great nurse, and we miss him a lot. He's now travelling, and I'm sure doing a helluva job wherever his little color-blind heart has taken him.

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What does your sex have to do with any of this?

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Many more men are color-blind than women.

According to Wikipedia (I know, I know, but it's just so awesome!):

"In the United States, about 7 percent of the male population - or about 10.5 million men - and 0.4 percent of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 2006). "

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see queenjean's answer regarding why this is usually a male issue

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Sorry for that remark- I was uninformed. Thank you for the information, queenjean.

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