Grossest thing that you've experienced?

[dirtyhippiegirl]

Story time! And the grosser, the better. Kudos to the first person who makes me throw up a bit in my mouth.

My story - I'm a burn nurse, relatively new. Anyway. I'm helping with a dressing change on a massive (90%+) burn who was also massively fluid resuscitated. Basically, that means that this guy is putting out gallons of insensible fluid loss. Plus skin sloughing. Picture this thick, partially congealed grey-brown liquid - like a poorly made Thanksgiving gravy - that is just sitting in the patient's bed.

Now, we do dressing changes in water proof gowns, hair nets, gloves (duh), and masks for a reason.

So we're turning the guy and, of course, a wave of fluid flows over the bed, coating my shoes and advancing upwards to soak through my scrub pants. I'm in the room for about an hour like that. We're almost done, turning the poor guy butt-towards me, when he starts to liquid stool everywhere. ("Burn poop.") It hits the wall behind me. I duck, manage to only get poop in my hair net. However, the turn buddy on my side who was holding up the patient's leg....drops said leg in order to get out of the way. Splat. (Splash?) I ended up getting a tidal wave of burn goo ALL OVER MY FACE. None in my mouth, thankfully.

Thank goodness for lock rooms and showers.

Admin Note: You might also like this topic with over 2000 fun nursing comments:

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

[SaoirseRN]

I've have a few, though none as bad as some of these!

First one I may have shared here before. We had a woman with copious C-Diff. She was youngish and normally independent but being as sick as she was we asked her to call for assistance when she needed to get up. Frequently she didn't, and this one time, I swear, she must have stood up, bend over, and made a 360 degree spin while spraying c-diff everywhere.

Weeks later, the room still smelled c-diffy, vaguely at times and more strongly at others. The department below her room started smelling it too. Well, her spray job had gotten the c-diff poo no only inside the wall-mounted heat register, but behind it, where it had leaked through the wall and seeped downward until they could smell it downstairs!

Number two (pun intended!) was a too young, very demented woman with the foulest ileostomy I have ever encountered. It was somewhere around 0200. We had just had a death and that person's family was due to arrive any minute. This woman got up, wandered down the hall, and BAM. Ileostomy burst all over the floor, right in front of the desk and the elevator -- just as the deceased patient's family arrived.

Number three is just weird. We had an elderly man who was mostly continent but "dribbled a little". So his solution to the dribbling was to roll his member up in this weird hybrid of a hair curler and a bag clip to keep it from dribbling!!!

[EX-EMT]

I hope you don't mind an EMS story. There was a semi with about 25 illegal aliens included in his load, and he was running from the Border Patrol, hit a turn too fast and rolled the truck. There were 7 know victim, and we were searching for any more. I hear "Help me", I turn around an the man who asked for help hands me something, so I swing my flashlight around, and see that he was suffering a massive evisceration, and I am holding his intestines in my arms.

[emtb2rn, BSN, RN, EMT-B]

I've seen more gross things as an emt than as an rn. Way back in the day while at mva, i got the following directive from the crew chief "hey rookie, get those brains off the dashboard."

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

Yeah, our neurosurgeon's idea of a joke when evaluating a potential organ donor was to point to the bloody cottage cheese oozing out and say, "There go the piano lessons."

[vslpn2004]

I had to replace a bandage on a hospice patient who had huge blisters on his lower leg, since hospice normally did the treatment I had not seen the leg recently, when I removed the old bandage, a large amount of fluid and slough went on my shoe, I wasn't expecting that and my shoes were soaked the rest of the night.

[fetch, BSN, RN]

Man, mine are tame compared to some of these - esp the colostomy sex - but here ya go anyway.

1. Nursing school, classmate pulls an old foley out and gets a shot of urine straight in her mouth! Taught me to always keep the lips firmly zipped.

2. Nursing school again, LTC, old man with a trach who refused to let anyone touch it at all. Wouldn't let the nurses even clean around it, much less us students who "don't know what you're doing!" His entire neck was crusty and covered with mucous. Blech. Hate to think what the inside looked like.

3. Just this morning, I hear our assistant principal frantically directing a student to the clinic. 4 yo walks in with what I thought was a bandaid on her face -- nope she just had a mucous mustache! Super thick, green and slimy, from nose to mouth. She hadn't wiped her nose since she got on the bus. (On the bright side, at least she didn't wipe that off on her hands!) I thought it was funny but the asst. principal almost puked in the hallway from it.

[Nurse SMS, MSN, RN]

The one about the patient that pooped in the air conditioner made me literally laugh out loud. So hard to explain why I am laughing to someone who would not find it funny.

My grossest story was a code I participated in. The patient was in for GI bleed, seemed fairly stable, then crashed hard, as GI bleeds tend to do, right at shift change. As the code was getting going, the doc running in for it had not even had time to get protective gear on. The patient sat up, spewed GI bleed out of her mouth and nose all over the doc, walls, floor....Suction canister was full in less than 3 seconds with nowhere else to put it and patient is now bleeding/oozing/spraying this poo smelling gronk out of pretty much every orifice while we crawl all over her getting started on compressions, trying to bag (impossible with this much output), attempting to intubate, etc. The smell was horrific. It took her relatives, who were in the room, then slightly out of the room, all of about 5 minutes to ask us to stop heroic measures. The patient was having squirts of this material with every chest compression. It looked like a horror movie set and smelled like nothing imaginable. Very traumatic code for all involved.

[PacoUSA, BSN, RN]

Once removed a dressing to find slough arranged in the design of a smiley face. The humor factor trumped the gross on that one ... Too bad it wasn't in the shape of Jesus, lol.