Every Nurse has that one patient they'll remember forever

noelly10 · Aug 13, 2015

I had a patient who asked for a comb. I went out of my way to hunt him down one because I felt that this was the one thing that would raise his spirits. I came back with a comb in hand and he took my hand and squeezed it and smiled really big and thanked me. He told me he was going to bring the comb home with him and remember me by it for all I did for him. It was actually during my first few months as a nurse and I'll never forget that look in his eyes when I did something as simple as bring him a comb. The smallest things make the biggest impact on people.

Farawyn · Aug 13, 2015

Lots of heartbreakers. And the violent ones. And the young ones.

Yet we still all talk about Mr. F who would disimpact himself every morning around 4 am and finger paint the railings, the walls and himself.

He ate like a bird, yet he would retrieve bocce balls of stool every single morning.

We didn't know how he did it. We were awestruck.

Jensmom7, BSN, RN · Aug 13, 2015

Four decades in Nursing-so many memories:

-The child of the mother with (undiagnosed) Munchausen's by Proxy. Got away with it for a few years until the day she miscalculated how long she could hold his meds and he came into the ER DOA.

-The lady with brain cancer who had an experimental port in her head, who told me "The last thing you want to hear after your Oncologist accesses your port is 'Oops...'"

-The little boy who was always sick, spent most of his time in the hospital. The biggest little cuddle bug no matter how many times he was poked, prodded and stuck. Finally diagnosed with an immune deficiency, got treatment and stopped being admitted. Saw him about 14 years later after discovering his mother was a HH patient of mine. He was 6'2", 210 lbs, and a football player!

-My first Hospice death. Happened the same day as the one year anniversary of my mother's death.

-The Hospice patient and her family who could have been poster children for a good Hospice experience. She was with us almost 2 months. Shortly before she died, she told me "I wish we had done this at least a month sooner. The minute you walked through our door, I knew everything was going to be ok."

Many more, but I don't want to monopolize the thread, and besides, it's hard to type through tears.

Cricket183, BSN, RN · Aug 13, 2015

I thought of two more to share....too hard to pick just one.

S. was 18 or 19 when she came to our unit. It was summer and she was due to start nursing school in the fall. She was drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful inside & out. Her mom was a RN. Dad worked for the hospital. She had a rare form of inherited leukemia, although now I can't recall exactly what it was. It is the only time I have ever had a patient with that particular type of leukemia. She was incredibly sick. Our normal patient ratio on the floor was 1:5-6. But there was a period of about 2 weeks where she was 1:1 because she was so sick. (She wasn't moved to ICU for multiple reasons, some political, some medical but I won't go into that). I was assigned to her and worked all but 2 days of that 2 weeks including a couple of 16 hour shifts. (I was one of two oncology certified nurses on the unit at the time and due to the political reasons that became important.) S. was with us for months but she did well. It wasn't long after that I became sick and eventually ended up going on disability, but a few years later I ran into her mom. S. was doing well, had got her LPN, was working at the same hospital where she had been a patient, and was working on her RN.

B. was another leukemia patient, AML. He was the definition of a grumpy old man. At first he intimidated me because he was so grumpy and abrasive. But one time as I was talking to him as I was hanging his chemo, I happened to catch him out of the corner of my eye and I realized he was watching me to see how I would respond to his gruffness. From that moment on, every time he started to give me a hard time--which was basically all the time--I gave it right back to him in a joking manner. I'm normally soft spoken and reserved but I have a quick wit. The first time I came back at him I caught him off guard and for a minute he was silent but then he just started laughing, one of those deep belly laughs. We often bantered back and forth and he became one of my favorite patients. He eventually lost his battle with leukemia but he will always have a special place in my heart. My grumpy friend.

CrunchBerries · Aug 13, 2015

I do, her name was Katherine. She was a mean, thoughtless, nasty, cranky, older lady with a thick German accent in a SNF where I was DON. I really did not like this lady, she went of her way to be mean. When I would have a need to speak with her it took all the patience I had not to tell her what I thought of her. When I would leave her room I would secretly stick my tongue out at her behind her closed door.

One night I had to go to the facility to terminate someone at 10:30PM. It left them short so I took the shift. Turns out my gut was right to terminate the nurse that night because he came back a few hours later and set fire to one of the buildings.

The fire was moving very fast, it started in the middle of the building and traveled to the left. I did not know the details of fire, I did not know that one room in a fire tends to collect heat, it doesn't necessarily burn, it just collects heat, severe heat. The only death/injury that night was Ray, the man in that room.

Katherine was one of the people I got out that night. After the fire we were all hugging and counting people and counting again.

It was really odd, from that point forward Katherine and I had a vastly different relationship. We understood one another and we were really nice to each other. We actually enjoyed chats for the first time, I really liked her.

Needless to say, I was one of the people that had a pretty nasty case of PTSD. I couldn't sleep, each time I would close my eyes I would see flames, hear fire destruction, and hear people screaming. It was horrible.

About 10 days later we were short staffed again and I came in to take the shift on midnights. We had five buildings and I had the building Katherine was in. Everyone was sleeping well and so I was at the nurses station going nutso all by myself. I would SWEAR I could smell smoke, I kept looking for this non existent fire and when there was no fire I would relax, start my paperwork and I would smell smoke again. I was losing my mind. I sat there shaking in fear and ... I was just losing it.

I finally went and got a largish metal pitcher and began filling patient water pitchers just for something to do. Right outside Katherine's room I dropped this metal pitcher on the hard tile floor. Katherine woke up screaming and swearing and I apologized profusely and well, just kept apologizing.

Finally, I stopped apologizing and sat on the edge of her bed and explained I actually did that on purpose. She asked why, I explained I wanted her to wake up. (I've never admitted this to anyone other than Katherine.) She asked why did I want her to wake up and I couldn't stop the tears and I responded that I was scared. She asked me if when i closed my eyes did I see flames? I said YES!!! Apparently, she did, too. She matter of factly said, "Okay!" She got up, put her robe on, and she sat with me at the nurses station and we talked all night. She told me what it was like to be a German Jew in Nazi Germany sneaking out of the country and what she had to go through to get into the US. An example is that she was 17, she was on board a US military ship. She had to (they all had to) have a physical by the medical officer and she had to have her first ever pelvic exam with all these male US soldiers watching and gawking at her. But she would do anything to escape the Nazis.

I wished that night could go on for a few more days, she had so much to tell me, she was this huge and massive wealth of information. She had my absolute attention for the night. I really wished I could have known *that* Katherine the previous years, she had so much information and history to share. I would have soaked it up.

I know today (and I knew then) it was wrong to wake a patient because *I* was afraid but I'd be a liar if I said I wouldn't do it again if I had a do-over. I would in a nanosecond. You can finger wag if you want, I did it and that is what happened.

Katherine died a couple of months later, it was a huge loss but she was in her 90s and it probably was her time.

I have another story to share, it's true. It's one of those spooky, what's going on moments.

A couple of months later I received a call, they were short handed and unable to get a registry nurse. They asked what they should do, I went in and took the shift. If nothing else the fire reinforced that we can't leave nurses short handed, ever.

It started all over again, although my PTSD was much better it was kicking in full force being there again, in the middle of the night. I was smelling smoke but there was no fire. I sat behind the nurses station and cried, I was crazy!

Now this was about 25 years ago. Helen was another patient, a verrrry sweet little old 90-something year old lady. She had been in a state institution since she was 16 years old. Apparently, according to family, she was to elope with her boyfriend and her parents caught wind of it. Wayyyyyy back when, one option to prevent a marriage was to put your child in a state institution and that is what happened to Helen. But nobody let her out until her 80s when the courts mandated cleaning out state run hospitals. She was freed for the first time and came to us.

So this night I am working and living in my own little crazy world in my head, smelling smoke that was not there, in tears hiding behind the nurses station. Helen woke up and came out to chat. Without an invitation she walked around the desk and sat next to me. She said Katherine came and told her to come out and talk to me. I gently reminded her Katherine has passed away. She said she knew, but Katherine came to get her anyway and told her I was frightened and she should go sit with me.

?????????

Then she reached for my hiding spot where I kept a candy dish for our patients, pulled the dish out (she couldn't know where it was) and ate candy while we chatted for the next few hours.

You can call me crazy and I'll cop to it, I knew I was crazy that night. But I believed Helen that night and I still do today.

I don't think I will ever forget Katherine, she was something else!

Elvish, BSN, DNP, RN, NP · Aug 13, 2015

Lots of patients.

The first HIV patient I took care of as a nurse. He was 30-something and in what was at the time called full-blown AIDS. Being both gay and HIV+ was a recipe for being disowned by your family in that neck of the woods, and he was no exception. For whatever reason, we hit it off splendidly. He had horrible neuropathy, so I was giving him hourly doses of enough MS Contin to put everyone on this thread into the afterlife. To make things worse, he was on contact precaution for something. As if he's not isolated enough by all he's been through and the fact that NO one came to visit him, here we are, we couldn't even go into his room without gloves. It was awful. I brought him his lunch tray and tried to joke around with him about the scrumptious hospital food he was about to devour. He allowed as how what he really wanted more than anything on God's green earth was a Butterfinger candy bar. The 'rules' were that we weren't supposed to buy thing for patients from the gift shop, but I pretended to not know that when I went down to get my own lunch. I may or may not have made a detour in the gift shop where two Butterfingers may or may not have been purchased. The look on his face when I snuck them in to his room was worth a million dollars. Those candy bars didn't change his prognosis; they didn't change much of anything, really. But if they let him know that someone cared, then I suppose they did what they were intended to do.

He died about two weeks later. No funeral, no memorial service. No family would have come, so I guess no one saw any point. But I have not forgotten him nor what he taught me.

middleagednurse · Aug 14, 2015

One July 4th I was caring for a man with HIV. The unit was quiet, he was lonely. I went into his room and said let's watch the fireworks. The hospital was about a mile from a big fireworks display, so we stood there at the window and watched the fireworks. I wonder I that may have been his last 4th. Back when, people with HIV usually didn't live long.

brandy1017, ASN, RN · Aug 14, 2015

I remember Al. He was the patient where I had to unzip the body bag when his autonomic nervous system kicked in and the bag started to move with his weak respiratory efforts. ..and code him again.
Sorry Al.
Try explaining THAT to the family!

Did he live?

tmpankazLPN · Aug 14, 2015

After 20+ years in different areas of nursing I thought I heard it all, or at least most of it. Until Ms.Irene,a resident on a LTC unit suffering from dementia and S/P right hip repair. She stayed by my side most of the shift telling me stories of the Russian ballet from which she was a ballerina in the 1930's. By the pictures on her wall she was some looker. I have long forgotten what exactly I did for her that she was so grateful, she told me there was a spot in heaven for me. I told her "Ms.Irene, I don't think that's where I will be going." In a stern voice, she stared me down and stated "Oh you will be going to heaven, you might not have any friends there, but you are going!"

annabanana2 · Aug 14, 2015

I had a home hospice patient, a wonderful woman in her late 50s who had come from South America when she was just 18 with her husband. She had four children, all sons, and all grown by the time I met her. She had cancer. Unfortunately her husband was both terrified of, and very angry at, the idea of losing her. He also had his own problems aside from his wife's illness.

He talked her into chemotherapy that she didn't want and that wouldn't help. He essentially consented to whole-brain radiation on her behalf. He refused to let her to go hospice when she very emphatically wanted to go. He refused to let me get her a hospital bed or a pressure-reduction surface and she sprouted a terrible pressure ulcer. He wouldn't give her her medications on time, and eventually, refused to give them at all. He denied her PRNs for pain and anxiety. We tried to circumvent him by putting her on a fentanyl patch, but he ripped it off of her one evening, throwing her into withdrawal by the next morning when we could get at her. I'm pretty new to nursing, but this was the hardest client/family situation I'd ever encountered.

Unfortunately eventually she died in the hospital, completely contrary to her wishes for a peaceful hospice death. Normally following a death I would do a bereavement visit to assess the family and refer to further services if they needed it, but this time instead I asked our social worker to do it, because I just couldn't face him. I'll never forget her. She reminded me so much of my mom.

TheGooch · Aug 14, 2015

Lots of patients.
The first HIV patient I took care of as a nurse. He was 30-something and in what was at the time called full-blown AIDS. Being both gay and HIV+ was a recipe for being disowned by your family in that neck of the woods, and he was no exception. For whatever reason, we hit it off splendidly. He had horrible neuropathy, so I was giving him hourly doses of enough MS Contin to put everyone on this thread into the afterlife. To make things worse, he was on contact precaution for something. As if he's not isolated enough by all he's been through and the fact that NO one came to visit him, here we are, we couldn't even go into his room without gloves. It was awful. I brought him his lunch tray and tried to joke around with him about the scrumptious hospital food he was about to devour. He allowed as how what he really wanted more than anything on God's green earth was a Butterfinger candy bar. The 'rules' were that we weren't supposed to buy thing for patients from the gift shop, but I pretended to not know that when I went down to get my own lunch. I may or may not have made a detour in the gift shop where two Butterfingers may or may not have been purchased. The look on his face when I snuck them in to his room was worth a million dollars. Those candy bars didn't change his prognosis; they didn't change much of anything, really. But if they let him know that someone cared, then I suppose they did what they were intended to do.
He died about two weeks later. No funeral, no memorial service. No family would have come, so I guess no one saw any point. But I have not forgotten him nor what he taught me.

That's sad.

Elvish, BSN, DNP, RN, NP · Aug 14, 2015

That's sad.

I agree. I remember his name, his face, and what room he was in. There was so little anyone could do to fix anything.