Pt./Family Comments that Leave You Speechless

Nurses General Nursing

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Specializes in Medical Surgical.

I seem to be hearing more and more comments from patients and families that just leave me speechless. I can think of no good response except helpless laughter, which I can't indulge in, so I bite my tongue and say nothing at all.

Here's two from last night:

Family observing nurse use barcoder to give insulin (or rather, struggle valiantly to use the barcoder, since it malfunctions about every three minutes): "Aren't you glad that you won't have to worry about making so many medicine errors anymore now that you have a great machine to do your thinking for you?"

And from a patient who wanted the max in IVP pain meds and slept very soundly through one of the prn time windows: " You should have woke me up or at least have it all drawn up and been standing by my bed waiting for me to wake up." What in the world can you say to comments like those? :smackingf

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Specializes in Med/Surg, Home Health.

omg, so funny. I had a patient once ask me ow he got a fishing line stuck in his arm (IV tubing).

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Specializes in PICU/NICU.

All the time family members say to me "I don't know how you do this everyday" and then I know what is coming....

"I could never do this, I hate to see children suffer" or "I could never do this, I just love kids too much!"

I just want to say "Yeah... I love seeing kids suffer!" I've spent my entire adult life taking care of critically ill children because I don't really like them!":eek:

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Specializes in acute rehab, med surg, LTC, peds, home c.

Heads are going to roll if my mom gets any sicker and you will all be held accountable, as she points to everyone at the nurses station including the unit sec., house keeper, MDs etc. The worst part was, she was a nurse.

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Specializes in Oncology.

The patients that call at 2150 saying, "Don't you remember, back at 8:30 I told you I wanted my sleeping pill at 9:45." Yeah, sorry about that, I was doing an EKG on my patient that just converted to rapid afib and hanging a cardizem drip. Next time, I'll make sure your sleeping pill is a higher priority and be there by 9:46 at the latest."

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Specializes in ICU, Med-Surg, Post-op, Same-Day Surgery.

At 2 in the morning after patient X calls for pain meds but subsequently refuses them down her NG tube when we get to the room: "I know my rights! You can't force me to take anything! I'm going to call the TV News people on you! You'll all be on Fox News because of this."

Nurse to patient X: "M'am, you don't have to take anything if you don't want to. But these are the pain meds you just asked for...?"

Patient responds: "Pain meds? Oh. I guess that's ok. Hold off on the news people for now. You can juice me up with those pain pills now."

Oh. OK. No problem then!!!! But I always did want my 15 minutes of fame.....!

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Specializes in Corrections, Cardiac, Hospice.

Family asked if they could stay in the room for the night after the body of patient went to the morgue.

When I worked the hospital I had a patient leave AMA one night and the next night show up with his suitcase in hand. Seems he changed his mind and wanted to check back in to his room from last night.

How do you respond to this nonsence?

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Specializes in MICU, SICU, PACU, Travel nursing.

Had a patient who had a tear in his airway that was incompatible with life, not to mention advanced terminal lung cancer who was vented and on SEVEN drips after wife had given him some "miracle juice" she bought at the healthfood store through his G-tube and he aspirated it. She was loopy religious and I had the pleasure of participating in the discussion with MD and family about how the patient is going to die and they need to consider DNR/hospice. She refused adamantly and asked the doctor if he was going to go on TV with her and tell everyone about it "when the miracle happened" and he was cured.

Also told nursing staff we were all "the devil" and that we were trying to kill him and that even if we managed to kill him she could resurrect him from the dead. She had "prophecies" everyday and told us all about them.

Oh and yes, she was POA and hospital lawyers were involved and told us we must respect her wishes and keep this poor man alive. Needless to say, the patient had a new nurse everyday as it was too much for the same person to have more than one shift..............

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Specializes in Corrections, Cardiac, Hospice.
Had a patient who had a tear in his airway that was incompatible with life, not to mention advanced terminal lung cancer who was vented and on SEVEN drips after wife had given him some "miracle juice" she bought at the healthfood store through his G-tube and he aspirated it. She was loopy religious and I had the pleasure of participating in the discussion with MD and family about how the patient is going to die and they need to consider DNR/hospice. She refused adamantly and asked the doctor if he was going to go on TV with her and tell everyone about it "when the miracle happened" and he was cured.

Also told nursing staff we were all "the devil" and that we were trying to kill him and that even if we managed to kill him she could resurrect him from the dead. She had "prophecies" everyday and told us all about them.

Oh and yes, she was POA and hospital lawyers were involved and told us we must respect her wishes and keep this poor man alive. Needless to say, the patient had a new nurse everyday as it was too much for the same person to have more than one shift..............

OMG. You just can't make this stuff up. :eek:

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Specializes in MICU, SICU, PACU, Travel nursing.
OMG. You just can't make this stuff up. :eek:

LOL, no you can't. I went on maternity leave before he passed, so I am still not sure what happened there. I am sure it was pretty bad...........

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Specializes in Med/Surg; aged care; OH&S.

middle aged man who informed me before i was about to give him an injection - "if you hurt me with that thing i'll hit you". uh no you won't. i promptly walked outside and asked the very burly, very male charge nurse to give the injection. no more complaints from mr nasty pants for the rest of the shift. :no:

a female visitor who walked up to me with a bag of fruit for her son and asked me to wash them. when i very kindly showed her the sink and tap, she put in a complaint about me for being non compliant. because that's why i went to nursing school, to wash fruit. :angryfire

after i just finished assisting in what was obvious to most people, an emergency situation (code blue) and had hair flying out of my pony tail, was sweating like a pig and was cleaning up the room, a relative asked me why her son's bed hadn't been made. it was around 9am.

picnicrn's comment really resonated with me. i've lost count of the number of people (not just patients/visitors, but friends, family etc) who inform me they are far too "nice" to be a nurse and "just couldn't stand seeing people in pain". yes. i love seeing people in pain and am obviously not nice. passive aggressive much?

honestly! :stone

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Specializes in LTC, assisted living, med-surg, psych.

A female visitor who walked up to me with a bag of fruit for her son and asked me to wash them. When I very kindly showed her the sink and tap, she put in a complaint about me for being non compliant. Because that's why I went to nursing school, to wash fruit. :angryfire

Hey, I just found out that I went to nursing school to be a janitor AND an ant exterminator! Seriously.........my nursing home is built on top of what must be one of western Oregon's biggest ant hills, and since the weather's warmed up they've been coming in to feast on the food that gets left on the floor, in residents' rooms, the lunchroom etc. Tonight a family flagged me down while I was trying to get ten blood sugars and ten sliding-scale insulins done, and told me that ants were EVERYWHERE in the dining room; OK, I'm in scrubs---do I look like the frackin' Orkin man?! So I go check it out, and sure enough, there are trails of them all over the room, crawling over dropped food morsels and residents' feet alike.

I ask the aides, "What do we do?" They inform me that they were told at their last in-service that if someone complained about ants, to have him/her see the charge nurse!! Now, what idiot came up with THAT idea?!!:angryfire I'm not trained to deal with ant invasions, that's what we've got maintenance people for, only they won't come in on the weekends and spray like everyone else does. With this family trailing me all over the building, I consult with the other charge nurse, who says to call the maintenance director to find out what to do. HE tells me just to mop 'em up with some bleach water. Yeah, like I have absolutely NOTHING else to do..........Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!:devil:

It's not that I don't want to help. Frankly, I'm embarrassed that our facility has such a bad ant problem, and I wish the people who are supposed to know what to do would just do it so these things don't happen anymore. But here's this family, expecting me to not only kill every ant in the dining room but their grandpa's room as well, even after I explained to them that it wasn't on my unit and I needed to get back to my own patients.

So I got HIS charge nurse, explained the situation to her, and gave her the mop bucket so she could go do battle in the room. Hey, I figured there was plenty of humiliation to go around, and I literally didn't have time to be messing around on another unit when I had all these fingersticks to do and yet another resident's daughter was following me around the unit wanting to know when I was going to replace the dressing SHE accidently ripped off her mother's behind when she oh-so-helpfully pulled down her briefs as she was transferring to the commode. YAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!:trout::flamesonb:flmngmd:

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