Okay, people. It's time for a nice, fun, light-hearted discussion to blow off some steam.
WHAT FREAKS YOU OUT? What bodily fluid can't you STAND? What wound gives you the absolute WILLIES? It doesn't matter if you're an ADN, BSN, LPN, CNA, PQRST, ABCDEFG...every body gets the heebie jeebies over SOMETHING...even you stomach-of-steel ER nurses!
Mine is eyeball injuries/surgery...aaaaaaaaackkkkkkk!! Gross! Makes my skin absolutely CRAWL. Or when someone gets a little cut on their finger/toe/whatever and then squeezes it to make it bleed!! Bleah!! Then there's the ever-popular RESPIRATORY SECRETIONS. I can handle poop, pee, amniotic fluid, lanced boils, pus, whatever...but give me a nasty snot-filled trach, and I'm OUTTA THERE.
I think what's kind of freaky about a deceased pt. is the way their blood settles. When you turn them to push the morgue bag under them, it's all purpley.
Working in the ED nothing really freaks me out. Well one thing does that makes me want to barf is when pt's have pureed soft diet and seeing pureed beef. UGH! :imbar
Working in the ED nothing really freaks me out. Well one thing does that makes me want to barf is when pt's have pureed soft diet and seeing pureed beef. UGH! :imbar
I confess I have eaten it myself when desperate and no time for a lunch break, and the patient was made NPO and couldn't have it. But it does look kind of like something that came from a wound that wouldn't heal.
:imbar ...SPUTUM!!!!! can do anything else, can cath the smelliest crotch, can do bowel care all day long, and love wounds, even the gangrenous ones.. but sputum gets me every time!!!
NH pt admitted the other night. His left nostril made a whistling noise. I asked him to blow his nose because there was obviously a build up of "matter" up there. He blew a couple times and out popped a dead cockroach!!! Almost hurled....
ok...here's a sputum story...when i was in school, we were doing our nursing home rotation and there was a young semi-veg w/ trach...(sorry for the crudeness) we were going to learn trach suctioning on her...teacher said..."everyone lookup" there were a bunch of secretions on the ceiling!!!why they were not cleaned up i do not know....but it was nasty!!!!!1
NH pt admitted the other night. His left nostril made a whistling noise. I asked him to blow his nose because there was obviously a build up of "matter" up there. He blew a couple times and out popped a dead cockroach!!! Almost hurled....
I got a young R/O MI pt from ER end-shift yesterday. I was rummy from lack of sleep over the past 5 days. I kept having to move his hands from his chest -he kept tangling his EKg leads in his fingers (too obese to fit in the gowns we had on hand, and didn't want to wear one anyway)and entangling his hands in the IV lines (on nitro, heparin, cardizem drips, I was focusing on trying to keep adjusting and resetting alarms). I also had to keep moving his feet/legs back onto the bed. I noticed his hands and feet had a pale yellow-orange stain on them, like they had recently been painted with a light coat of betadyne. I asked him what procedures the ER had been doing that his hands and legs/feet were that color. He said, "Oh,that's from the diarrhea I've had for the last 2 weeks; I havent been able to take a shower yet." That's when I noticed he was a bit jaundiced, and that the bilirubin poopstains and other crud were all up under his long fingernails and toenails too; The day I don't smell and recognize poop, and even worse, didn't have gloves on several times that I touched him, I know my brains were too scrambled to be working!
little asian man found down at home, E.R. reported suctioning maggots out of nose and NGTube and Et Tube. I was almost sick myself seeing it; until his family came in and reported he had eaten a huge bowl of rice just before coding at home.
OrthoNutter
169 Posts
Sputum....definitely sputum