Patients Say the Darnedest Things - WIN $250! Nurses Week Contest 2018

The wildest thing I've ever had a patient say was one day while I was giving my client a bed bath, she began having a coughing fit. I asked her if she was alright and I sat her up some and patted her back a bit and she says "Don't smoke cocaine, if you do you are going to cough, cough, cough until you drink some coffee." She caught me so off guard all I could say was yes ma'am I'll make sure I never do that!

The one I remember best was an elderly gentleman who put on his call light during the night, maybe around 02:00. I went into his room and asked "Mr. ---, what can I help you with?" He yelled out really loudly "my balls need adjusted!"

Seems he had slid down in bed and not everything slid with him

I cared for a confused patient several years ago. About 6 hours into my shift I entered their room to check on them. The patient said "Is this our base of operations all day, or are we going to your house later?"

"This is the worst restaurant I have ever been to." We were in the ortho unit of a large hospital.

Once I had a patient who didn't do well after a total knee and was sent to us in ICU. Nice older man, totally with it and easy to talk to. I came in one morning and he told me the nurses had been really loud during the night because somebody had a birthday and they had ordered pizza. He says, "I started once to just get up and go home!" I said, "You wouldn't have got very far with all this stuff attached to you and no ride home." He says, "Lady, I had my horse!"

We had a 90 something year old lady in ICU with a serious head injury. She was totally unresponsive but you still have to do the neuro checks q4 anyway. One morning I asked her, "Mrs. Smith, do you know what today is?" She opened her eyes for the first time in about 2 weeks and says, "Well, I hope it's not my d***n birthday again!" I didn't know little old ladies talked like that!! It was actually the Fourth of July.

I had a very elderly patient on my neuro stroke unit a few years back who was confused and agitated, she thought she was constipated when she wasn't. I had just helped her to the commode with my CNA and she had a nice big BM, but she kept insisting she needed help with her constipation. First she asked me to dig my gloved hand into her rectum to get the BM out, when I said no she asked for me to give her a glove so she could do it to herself with her own hand, when I said no again she told me at home when she's constipated she: "takes a pair of scissors and just digs it out". At which point she asked to borrow my scissors. I had to leave the room fast and burst out laughing.

I was getting a patient to the shower chair to assist with bathing and he said, "please don't judge Richard by the size he is right now, I'm a grower, not a shower. It may look like a turtle head right now, but he's just being shy".

Richard, of course, was his member.

Psych patient walks up to the nurses station and says this:

Patient "You have beautiful eyes"

Nurse "Thank you"

Patient "Yeah, they are big and brown"

Nurse "Thank you"

Patient " Yeah, like deer eyes"

I thought it was so funny!

hahahahaha

"My right lung feels like a fig".

No cognitive issues, totally A & O. Not sure what the nursing intervention would be for that.

This made me chuckle!