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

[yazisizit]

I was working a night shift on a tele floor as a new Nurse.

We had this one poor old lady who was confused and was restrained as usual for her safety. She was our designated resident nightmare geri from hell, so she was placed near the Nurse's station.

So we are chilling out at the Nurse's station, chatting and trying to get through another night...

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see our lady in question standing in the dimly lit doorway of her room!

I instantly leap out and run to her. As I approach her, she appears to be falling towards me, so I meet her in a bear hug...my arms around her waste, and her arms around my shoulders.

As I catch the lady, I notice a very strong smell of feces, and I feel something warm on my hands, arms and shoulders...

My fellow heroes come in behind me, and as the lights are turned on, my worst fears are instantly realized.

Yes, I caught the poor old lady with a good old bear hung football catch, but I was also covered in the lady's feces.

As I look at her, she has feces smeared all over her arms and hands... (and even her face!)

And of course, now so did I!

[rph3664]

Writing on the wall with stool is another.

Speaking of this, that guy-Mike (?) on Dirty Jobs did this on an episode I saw recently. It was the one where the lady had the sewer system for hers and 3 or 4 other houses back up into her basement. I have seen a lot, but that--almost--made me gag!

I love Mike Rowe! When you watch "Dirty Jobs", aren't you glad we don't have Smell-o-Vision?

Too bad ethics prevent him from job shadowing nurses!

[marmsgirl]

I still shudder when i think about it ..urine looked like split pea soup and had consistency of gravy in foley bag.

[luce2008]

I was working night duty in a medical ward when I answered a young fellows' buzzer. He asked for something to spit in to (with a full mouth). I hurriedly returned with a sputum cup, however he didn't realise there was a lid on it and he hoiked the biggest golly onto the lid that you've ever seen. I yelled at him that there is a lid on the cup and he promply sucked up the golly, took the lid off and spat it into the cup.

I left the room heaving.

Your story give me my first good laugh since I have been nurse for 1 year.

[Diahni]

Positively hurl-o-genic! Just noticed that this thread has been going on since the summer of 2002.

Did you ever have dinner with nurses and civilians together? That's funny! Gross me out!

Diahni

[luce2008]

The time I was prepearing NCLEX, as I still worked as medical assistant. it was in a outpatient clinic, some odd smell made every staff hold breath when pass through the waiting area, and complainted when thay back to nursing station.

an man was called in to a room, coming with that strong stinging smell, everyon in the hallway turned her head or moved back avoid the smell. no one wanted to triage him. they said "Hey this will be your nurse enrtence test" so I was in the room with him.

I asked him to take off his sneakers since his feet hurted for a week. Because he couldn't bend down to do it, I have to do it for him. as soon as the feet were off the sneakers, the smell hit me like a sting bomb but 1000 times worse. I closed my mouth tight, since i couldn't shut up my nose. I wanted to shut up eyes and ears too so it would not came into me. the room was like filled with tons of rotten eggs. people in hallway yelling "What are you doing, close the door!" I yelled back "only if you want me pass out, or you come in and countinue." the sneakers weighted more than 10 lbs, drainage was dripping from the socks. the poor man keep the feet in the sneakers for the last 3 days for he worried he wouldn't able to fit in the sneakers if he ever took them out. needless to say the feet were in very bad condition, and was sent to ER for admition. Good dicision he made was he was not going to keep the socks and sneakers and allowed us to through away.

I passed my "nurse test", my coworker said.

[rph3664]

The time I was prepearing NCLEX, as I still worked as medical assistant. it was in a outpatient clinic, some odd smell made every staff hold breath when pass through the waiting area, and complainted when thay back to nursing station.

an man was called in to a room, coming with that strong stinging smell, everyon in the hallway turned her head or moved back avoid the smell. no one wanted to triage him. they said "Hey this will be your nurse enrtence test" so I was in the room with him.

I asked him to take off his sneakers since his feet hurted for a week. Because he couldn't bend down to do it, I have to do it for him. as soon as the feet were off the sneakers, the smell hit me like a sting bomb but 1000 times worse. I closed my mouth tight, since i couldn't shut up my nose. I wanted to shut up eyes and ears too so it would not came into me. the room was like filled with tons of rotten eggs. people in hallway yelling "What are you doing, close the door!" I yelled back "only if you want me pass out, or you come in and countinue." the sneakers weighted more than 10 lbs, drainage was dripping from the socks. the poor man keep the feet in the sneakers for the last 3 days for he worried he wouldn't able to fit in the sneakers if he ever took them out. needless to say the feet were in very bad condition, and was sent to ER for admition. Good dicision he made was he was not going to keep the socks and sneakers and allowed us to through away.

I passed my "nurse test", my coworker said.

My 9-year-old niece wants to be a doctor. Reads age-appropriate medical books for fun and found a picture of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman physician, online and printed it off and hung it on her bedroom wall next to her Hannah Montana poster.

I will let her find out about things like this on her own, just like the resident who told me that her own 8-year-old daughter thought she wanted to be a doctor too, "until she found out that doctors have to stick their fingers up people's butts."

[oncnursemsn]

((Diahni))) This is a bit off topic, but just attended a lovely dinner paid for by Merck drug company complete with salmon for entree. The topic? CINV- better known as Chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting, complete with 1 hour lecture on the mechanics of how someone gets nauseated and what triggers vomiting. In depth conversation including salivating, wretching, etc. All while the servers are filling our wine glasses and putting steaming plates of food down. gag.

BTW, how's the wine?

[diane227, LPN, RN]

I had a woman in the ED shock room one night who rolled over on the stretcher and vomited into my shoe. I said " have you been drinkin that Mad Dog? (slag for a fortified cheap wine called MD20-20). She was very indignant. "No, I drink Thunderbird" (another cheap wine). Sorry I offended you ma'am!!!

I had a psych social worker come into the ED one night to a psych eval on a patient. This social worker was dressed to the 9's. All fancy with 3 inch heels and all. She had this real expensive handbag. She went into the patients room to speak with her and she sat her bag down by the bed. It was open. As she was talking to the patient, the patient hung her head off the rail and vomited (charcoal included) directly into her bag. I laughed so hard I could not contain myself. We never saw this particular social worker again.

I had a guy one time perch himself on the side of a sink to take a dump. He looked like a raptor, sitting there waiting to fly off.

I had a psychotic patient one night go off and get up off the stretcher, trying to fight all the staff. He was a huge guy, real fat. He had on only his underwear. We were trying to get him under control and we had him down on the floor trying to give him Haldol. He as all over the place, very hard to control. His parents were there, screaming don't hurt him, don't hurt him, all the while he was taking swings at the staff and telling one of the male nurses that he was going to jerk his balls off. I finally told the woman that the only person in danger was the staff. Just get out of the way and be quiet.

[kmarie724]

This is nothing compared to most of these stories, but I'll share it anyway.

One night working noc shift as a CNA a resident puts his call light on. The other CNA I was working with goes to answer the light. A few minutes later she comes back, goed into the clean linen room and gets a set of bed linens and says to me "Can you come help me?" Of course I say yes and we go to the resident's room.

When I walk into the room, I notice it smells just awful! Obviously he had been incontient of stool and needed to be changed. No big deal, I do that all the time. But when I look closer I notice that he had a massive amout of diarrhea. There was so much that it was running off the edge of the bed into a very large, very smelly puddle on the floor. I have never in my life seen so much poop come from a single person! I didn't think the intestines could hold that much! He was wearing an incontient brief, but it hadn't done a bit of good to contain it. We were in there a good 45 minutes getting him, the bed, and the floor cleaned.

Oh, and I was 10 weeks pregnant at the time and very much in the sensitive to smells and nauseated all the time phase. How I managed not to puke, I don't know!

[sasha2lady]

Before I was a nurse I was a cna....had a woman who was pretty much a vegetable with a feeding tube....anyway...it was her shower day that day and when I had the nurse to come in to unhook the feeding tube so I could put her on a shower bed....this woman took a deeeeeep breath and somehow popped the top off of the part that was in her stomach and out came god only knows how much tube feeding right in my face and hair!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It smelled like old sour milk that had curdled......it grossed me out sooo bad....point taken ...from that day on ...i always put a towel around her stomach just in case she decided to squirt me again.

[Purple_Scrubs, BSN, RN]

To any pre-nursing students or those contemplating nursing reading this: if you can read this entire thread and still want to go to nursing school, do it! :)

[Jessiedog, RN]

We used to have a resident with rotting black feet. Every now and then a toe would fall off. I felt bad for his roommate for having to endure the smell for such a long time.

Working several years ago in a rehab ward, we had one guy with a BKA due to poor circulation. The other foot wasn't faring so well, either. He'd ignored the warning signs of cool & dusky toes, and even the loss of sensation and then loss of movement. By the time he got to us, his entire foot was necrotic. But not moist necrotic; it was dry, solid necrotic.

I swear you could tap on his foot, and get a hollow sound back! The foot halfway up the calf was solid, black, dead flesh!! I have never seen anything like it before or since. (and this was only my second year of nursing) The whole foot felt and sounded like a piece of black wood. If I'd grabbed a toe & tried to bend it, I KNOW it would have snapped off in my hand! Eeewwwww!!!

The smell was interesting, too. This was when we only had four-bed rooms, so the old fella always had room-mates, although we did the best we could. The smell was a very sweet, all-pervading odour, kind of maple-syrupy, and not at all nasty or offensive unless you knew what the cause was. This, somehow, made it worse! That something that looked so horrible could almost smell nice!

Anyway, the surgeon managing him wasn't quite sure that an amputation was warranted (duhhh ) so we were doing daily dressings. The entire foot and leg had to be dressed with parraffin-impregnated gauze, then non-stick dressings and bandages. This was the current treatment for necrosis, and worked well with a moist necrotic area. Trying to wrap parraffin gauze around this thing and:deadhorse hold it while bandaging was a complete waste of nursing effort, but we dutifully did it.

After a couple of weeks, the amputation was performed, and the fella eventually went home with two prosthetic legs. The amazing thing was that with this dead limb attached for so long, he never developed any systemic problems, or even needed IV antibiotics! One of the 'wonders of modern medicine' ?