remember when....?

LegzRN · May 8, 2011

Wow! Did it work?

Still do it for antifreeze ingestion !

No Stars In My Eyes · May 8, 2011

Not ALLOWED to wear gloves unless you were doing a sterile procedure; poop, puke, didn't matter! Washed hands even more X just to get rid if the poop smells!...All bedpans were metal;and no disposable pads or wipes.....Halo frames had full-body PLASTER body casts; would cut out "windows" if sores developed.....Urine-test for sugar:ten drops urine in glass tube, five drops of urine, add a tablet, wait 30-60 seconds holding tube by TOP, because the bottom of the tube got REALLY HOT! Match color in tube to color on chart + sometime very difficult to decide which color it matched......and here's how old I am:No individually wrapped pills; Medicine cart was "open"; in other words, full bottles of meds, including percodan (!!!) on tiers or "steps" on top of cart + the only meds in locked med- room were injectable narcs. Med cards were two-inch squares and fit in a slot directly behind med cup; Med trays were lind of like tiny cupcake baking pans, but molded plastic, could be for six med-cups, up to twenty-four .......Lots and lots of older pts. had indwelling foleys long-term......and the charting ! If nothing unusual happened on the shift.....GET THIS! You'd write "Status quo" and sign your name!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MikeyBSN · May 8, 2011

Remember when patients and their families appreciated the work that we did as nurses? Remember when the administration offered us a raise and more vacation time for obtaining magnet status or increasing our hospital ranking? Remember when your hospital upgraded your nursing lounge to show their appreciation for the nursing staff?

Me neither...

alphabetsoup · May 8, 2011

Well geez, I'm not THAT old. But the biggest change I have seen is really in the way we do our documentation. Everything is on a computer and nothing is "written" in a chart. And our communication- nurses carry phones and patients have the numbers! Unheard of back when I started but technology rules the planet.

mustlovepoodles, RN · May 8, 2011

I remember as a student when Galbladders and appendectomies stayed in the hospital for 3 weeks- nothing to eat for days, foley's for at least a week. Do we still 're feed' patients thier bile?

:uhoh3: OMG, I hope not! I remember having to empty their drain to collect that nasty viscous green bile and them mixing it with some grape-flavored medicine. I couldn't believe that patients actually drank that stuff. It made me sick just looking at it! :uhoh3:

I do remember the days when we were actively discouraged from wearing gloves because "it would make our patients feel bad, like they were dirty." Back in the bad old days when no fathers could dare to cross the threshold of a labor & delivery suite because they surely would either faint or "they'd never want to have sex with their wife again when they saw how horrible it is." I kid you not. I remember the days when babies born at 7 months were wrapped in blankets and left to expire in a bassinet--nurses were forbidden to pick the babies up because "they needed to go ahead an die so the family could get over it." When women came in with premature labor it was very common to hook them up to an alcohol drip, get them rip roaring drunk in the hope of relaxing the uterus and ending the premature labor. Sometimes it worked for a few days, but mostly they were puking and crying and delivering tiny babies that we coudn't resuscitate because the tiny equipment wasn't available. We had a "special nursery" too, for "water-head" babies and "mongoloids". I wish I was kidding, but I'm not. Even back then I thought these practices were barbaric, but I was only 20 years old and had no power to change them.

Brian, ASN, RN · May 8, 2011

FYI: I moved this thread to the General nursing forum.

Blackcat99 · May 8, 2011

I remember being a nurse's aide in a 99 bed nursing home. The other aide and I would change incont. patients- most of the 99 patients were incont during the night. It was just 2 aides for 99 patients. :eek: :eek: :eek:

It was exhausting. I remember the 2 LPN charge nurses just sitting around and chatting all night. They rarely ever had any tube feeders at that time. I remember thinking "I am going to be an LPN someday and then I can sit around and relax all night." Of course, by the time I actually became an LPN the rules had changed and it never happened for me. :crying2: When I became an LPN, I worked night shift and I was the one and only nurse for 99 patients. I had about 15 tube feeders too!!! :mad:

No Stars In My Eyes · May 8, 2011

Yikes, Blackcat99, there goes my fond remembrance of decent staffing ratios!How long did you work there? Were you nearly dead by the end of your shifts? I can't even begin to think how I would begin to tackle that kind of a burden! Whew!

Blackcat99 · May 8, 2011

Yikes, Blackcat99, there goes my fond remembrance of decent staffing ratios!How long did you work there? Were you nearly dead by the end of your shifts? I can't even begin to think how I would begin to tackle that kind of a burden! Whew!

Yes, I was nearly dead by the end of my shifts. I worked as an aide at that facility for about 8 months.

I worked as an LPN at that other nursing home facility for about a year. It's making me tired right now just thinking about it.

Esme12, ASN, BSN, RN · May 9, 2011

I remember as a student when Galbladders and appendectomies stayed in the hospital for 3 weeks- nothing to eat for days, foley's for at least a week. Do we still 're feed' patients thier bile? bili bags, never wore gloves(yuk), mixing(reconstituting from powder) all my own antibiotics and putting them into 'solusets" hourly outputs included-"dropping" the hourly rate of fluid into a soluset chamber every hour, glass TPN bottles, Hepatitis patients were in strick isolation- door closed, nurse covered head to toe(booties on our shoes). Weren't the red rubber NG tubes called cantor tubes and about 3 miles long with a bladder at the end where the physican injected mercury? Pateints were admitted for "GI work-ups" BE's, barium swallows and colonoscopies and EGD's.

CAntor tubes were different.....We actually used red rubber NGT's.....What's even worse we would wash them in a "disinfectant" after using them to be used again.....then they started gas sterlizing them......I remember metal bedpans and the hopper to wash them.......NOTHING quite sounds like a metal bedpan or urinal when dropped at 3am!!!!

allnurses Guide · May 10, 2011

Helping the nurse turn a pt onto their side so we could tape the pt's butt cheeks open, lol. The tape stretched from the crack and affixed to the side rail. Then the nurse would set the heat lamp on the the pt's bum to to dry up the decube.

We used Crisco as a moisture barrier. It worked.

I also remember we cleaned up alllllllll sorts of stuff... no gloves.

But I still swear isolation was done better, then. You had to have another person outside the room to double bag. Now they just drag the contaminated bag straight out. What's the point of that?

Was taught to test the urine for sugar.

Aides were also expected to do enemas and digital removal... we did use gloves for the latter. I don't know if they let aides do that stuff any more. I don't think so.

No messy rooms, no messy uniforms, no dirty shoes... by golly, you better have your hair up. To this day, I cannot stand seeing nurses and aides with their hair down.

And what about the pt's? They sure have changed too!

The old gents who would rather die than not have their shirts tucked in and their belts on. You had to make sure you parted their hair in the left. No "man" would part his hair on the right, lol.

And the old ladies: "foundation garments". You wanted to see an old lady get mad? Take away her stinky girdle and garters...

They were such a trip to get dressed!

Haven't seen any of those super old-fashioned types in years now.

Oh yeah... the creaky old chain-link Hoyer lifts. Simple enough to use, but prone to tip over. Never would have dreamed of moving a pt in one of those w/ no help!

Fun thread!

No Stars In My Eyes · May 12, 2011

Oh, yeah, I remember hooking those ladies into their 32 hook+eye foundation garments with the garters dangling down, and putting hose (nylons) OVER the supporthose...in JULY.....when the hospitals DIDN"T have AC!!!! I made a comment about being thankful for being born in the age of uncomplicated underwear, one lady said "Oh, honey, I just feel naked without this girdle." Well, I gave up panty-girdles at the age of 16! And I found out that a garter-belt and hosiery was much cooler in the summer than panty-hose!!!!That was in the day when pant-suits were NOT permitted, fine by me, they were made out of the awfullest polyester and looked like some old guy's p.j.'s, not cut very stylishly.We also still wore caps so the patients knew who was a nurse: RN's had a black stripe on their caps and LPN's had navy-blue; student nurses had one, two, three, or four pale blue stripes on one corner of their cap so you could tell frosh. from sr. and knew what to expect from them, experience-wise.