Doctor My Eyes.....

**VivaLasViejas**, ASN, RN

For better or worse, I have decided that a nursing career is essentially an unending series of full-moon weekend nights.

All of you who've been doing this for any length of time at all know exactly what I'm talking about: that free-floating weirdness we really can't describe, or identify, but which we spend a lot of time dodging because we don't want to get any on us. It tends to peak during the full moon, especially during hot summer evenings when the booze flows freely and the crazy and the stupid get amped up; but it can happen at any time, and anywhere. And after a while, it all becomes....normal.

I had this discussion just the other morning with my son, who works nights as a medication aide at my assisted living facility. For all his youth, he takes his responsibilities seriously and does his best to appear unflappable, but he was obviously rattled by the experience of doing the last routine check of the night on our resident Munchausen's patient......only to find the 55-year-old sitting on the floor without a stitch of clothing on, practically folded in half and performing an act of, shall we say, autoerotic stimulation (and NOT in the usual fashion, if you catch my drift).

Oh! the humanity! I think Ben's still assessing the damage to his psyche (not to mention his visual acuity after his corneas melted). But the incident got me to thinking about all the traumatic, ugly, obscene, funny, and downright absurd things we health professionals see during the course of a career, and I've got to say there's probably a hundred and one that have burned themselves into my own memory. Unfortunately, they have this annoying tendency to pop into my mind's eye at THE most inconvenient times, like now....when I'd really rather go to sleep for the night.

I can't forget:

.....The patient whose toes resembled Raisinets. I was working my very first nursing job in a SNF, and when I went to unwrap the bandage, two of them dropped off the foot and right into my gloved hands, prompting a rather unprofessional (and almost overwhelming) urge to blow my groceries. Only the presence of the CNAs saved me, and only because I didn't want them to know how green I really was!

.....The 80-something telemetry patient whose 40-something girlfriend snuck in after visiting hours. The tele nurse called the floor to ask me to go check on him since his rhythm was doing some crazy stuff on the monitor. I went in to see if he was OK, and.....well, not to put too fine a point on things, they were going at it hard and heavy. 'Nuff said.

.....The LOL who ripped a catheter out of a confused patient who'd been yelling all night, apparently disturbing her beauty sleep, and strolled down to our nurses' station with the drainage bag and tubing still in her hand. "NOW he's got something to cry about!" she said with a gleam of triumph in her faded blue eyes.

.....The grimly determined expression on the face of a grandfather who'd just been diagnosed with stage III esophageal cancer and decided he didn't want to be a burden to his family. He informed me very calmly that he intended to kill himself. I begged him not to. He promised me he would think about it. Three days later, I read in the newspaper that he had shot himself in the head the day after being discharged from the hospital.

.....The litter of kittens, complete with the mother cat, that an asthmatic patient's family had brought in to "visit" her. (I wound up taking one of them home, a little sleek black kitty who's still with us over a dozen years later.)

.....The new parents who couldn't read or understand the instructions that came with their infant's car seat. The grandparents were just as useless; Grandpa even came in to see the baby with a beer tucked in his back pocket. I had to install the seat myself in their borrowed vehicle, put the baby in it, buckle her in properly.....and then send her home with this illiterate, dysfunctional family.

.....The elderly diabetic with Stage IV decubs on her coccyx, right heel, and both greater trochanters, whose son and daughter-in-law had neglected her so badly while she lived with them that the hospitalist made them stay in the room and watch as a surgeon performed sharp debridement at the bedside.

.....The nineteen-year-old primigravida, with multiple piercings and tattoos, who jerked her hand away when I tried to start her IV because she "hated needles".

.....The hilarity that ensued when said nineteen-year-old primigravida was also found to have dyed her hair "down there" to match the bright blue streaks in the dishwater blonde locks that grew on the top floor.

These are but a few of the scenes that have amazed, disgusted, angered, and otherwise entertained me over the years. What are some of yours?

Doctor My Eyes.....

About VivaLasViejas, ASN, RN

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