I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I seem to have a knack for remembering pointless things.
I remember the names of restaurants that I've eaten at on vacations, the servers' names, and other useless information that I will never need to recall in my life again.
This also applies to my time in nursing school, which admittedly wasn't that long ago, but long enough that a lot of the non-vital "nice to know but not need to know" information that we learned has become a little hazy.
The one random nugget of seemingly useless information that I remember from nursing school is what a scleral buckle is and what it is used to treat. It was briefly mentioned in my second semester of nursing school and for some reason it stuck with me. I've never encountered someone that has had this procedure in clinical OR in my personal life and I really have no justification for remembering it, but I do.
Does anyone else care to share a random nugget of information they learned in nursing school that they still remember, but never actually came in handy to know?
Lots of tidbits that I remember, that I've never actually come across, or used. The symptoms of Autonomic Dysrefexia. The Halo Test for checking for CSF. Cushing's Triad.
What they drove into us from the very first, was that the patient always comes first. It is amazing how I had to always fight for the patients in spite of doctors, management, and family/visitors.
I remember thinking in microbiology "why on earth do I need to know anything about Hansen's bacillus!!!??
Low and behold while doing a pre-op history didn't I run across a man who had taken methotrexate and when I asked him what he took it for he told me...leprosy. Apparently it works because he had no outward signs of having had the disease.
Ok, so this wasn't actually taught in nursing school, just coincided well...
We were studying abdominal disorders around the time Regretsy, a website mocking Etsy items of questionable taste/talent, popped up. Also, Twilight was popular.
One of the posts was of this - apparently a witch biting out some guy's umbilicus.
I will never forget Cullen's sign (I just pretend the "witch" is actually a vampire).
You know, when I see nurses glove up to check a blood pressure on a perfectly clean patient, I wonder if that saying isn't true, in some cases.
I work in the ER and I put gloves on to touch any surface in the room, patient or otherwise.
The things I've found on "clean" walls and equipment when doing a thorough wipe-down would make you shudder... and the things I've seen patients touch before touching visually "clean" parts of themselves, too.
Unless I've just personally bathed them, there is no such thing as "perfectly clean patient" imo.
CT Pixie, BSN, RN
3,723 Posts
I asked one of the docs I work with and he said its called the gluteal cleft, I've had other docs call it the intragluteal cleft.
Either way to me...its the butt crack or the plumbers smile :)