Has anyone seen...

Nurses General Nursing

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I would just like to know has anyone ever seen any kind of flying insect in a hospital PICU or NICU or Med/Surg ?

Patient brought in a radio from home. We kept seeing roaches, and guess what? Roaches were living in her radio by the thousands. We bagged the radio and ran it out of the hospital. It was creepy.

Flies will get into the OR through closed double doors and land on your sterile field. God only knows how they get through the doors. We sprayed them with Benzoin spray to stick their wings together so they would fall on the floor and we could remove them. I even worked in an OR that had a electronic fly killer in the hall of the OR.

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Specializes in Neuroscience ICU, CNRN, SCRN.

I'm in Florida, so we are used to bugs, all year round. Just in the last month I've seen gnats flying around a dietary cart that was desperately in need of emptying on my med/surg unit, and I saw the same kind of gnat down in SICU (in the breakroom) the next week. I also remember a patient that brought in his CPAP from home and the staff kept finding german roaches in his room. Apparently the CPAP was a roach motel, so it was sent back home! I also remember taking my daughter in for outpatient surgery (this was about 20 years ago) and finding ants swarming on the window sill of her third floor room. When I went to work for this same facility in 2004 the ants were still there! We had problems with them all the time. Occasionally they would get into a patients bed and create real problems there until we could get the exterminator to come take care of them.

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Specializes in B.S. Psychology.
For those who believe in superstition....

I have heard when you see a fly in the unit, a patient is going to die.I cant say that it always happened, but when you saw one, it made you paranoid.

I did always wonder how a fly got on the upper floors of a hospital. I'm talking about those buildings that are like 10-12 floors! The windows dont open, of course, so how do they get in? Do they ride the elevator or what???

That's a cute vision :) I wonder how they press those elevator buttons...

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Thanks everyone, for all the nice replys. Makes me feel so much better. Happens I was bitten by something in a PICU unit. And in retrospect I'm remembering that a 7 month old baby there had a couples of little red marks on his cheeks.

When I commented to another of my professors, she told me that she once worked in a pediatric unit, and she and another nurse saw a teeeeny tiiiiny insect crawling on a babys hand in the incubator! Barely visible, well they searched and searched to no avail, they never found it. She reported it.

Thanks again for the replys. The only thing of concern to me would be an encephalitis, but I'm not gonna give it more thought, Just keep my eyes open for S/S.

Thanks all, This site is great! :balloons:

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I work on a step-down unit, and a pt. that got transferred to us from ICU had maggots in his nose while in the ICU!! His wife was the one who found them! Also we had a pt who lived on our floor for a couple months whose room was infested with roaches because she was smuggling food when she was npo!!

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All the time. Why do you ask?

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Specializes in ER.

One night I was wakling down the hall and a bat came out of the ceiling and flew towards me, then into a patient's room. She was confused and kept saying "I thought I saw a bat!" We all agreed that yes, she must have, and I nearly wet my pants.

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All the time. Why do you ask?

Not sure, but I think this is the same one who thought she might have been bitten on the back of the neck and was asking advice about the bite. She might want to know if it's possible for it to really have been a bug bite.

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All the time. Why do you ask?

I got bitten on the back of my neck by something in a PICU unit on Monday. It got itchy and very red. A search turned up nothing at that time.

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Our breakroom had an outbreak of some sort of gnats. Made every lunch feel like a picnic. Nobody's sure how they got there.

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Specializes in Med-Surg, ED.

gnats, black flying critters near the sinks and drains, an occasional fly, and mice.....

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:chair::eek::eek::eek:

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