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!

[nitenite]

This one didn't happen to me, but it happened to my good friend, and it's a classic.

The patient was an unfortunate woman who'd been ejected from her car and then laid in a ditch for an unknown length of time until she was discovered. She had severe basilar skull fractures, and it was summer in Texas.

A few nights later, my friend was bathing her. She was washing the patient's face when suddenly a stream of hundreds of maggots came spewing out of the patient's nose. Maggots were everywhere: squirming on the patient's mouth, her chin, her gown, falling off the sides of the bed.

My friend, who is the most excellent ICU nurse and as cool as a cucumber, screamed like a little girl. The phlebotomist was drawing blood at that moment; when Jeni started screaming, he immediately ran away, out of the room, leaving the needle in the patient's arm. The rest of the staff took one look at Jeni's ashen face and thought she was about to die; someone grabbed the crash cart.

To this day, ten years later, Jeni has never eaten rice again.

Oh wow, you win. :barf01::barf01::barf01::barf01::sofahider

[talaxandra]

Two stories told to me by Jane, an ANUM, when I was quite junior that have stayed with me ever since:

A student nurse was sent down to ED to sit with a patient who had esophageal varices because the department was slammed. She'd only just started the hospital-based training program and nobody told her why she was there or what she was supposed to look for, an experience I'd also had - in my case it had to do with a young girl, an axilla DVT and a streptokinase infusion, but I digress. About half an hour after she arrived in the department the varices ruptured, showering blood over the nurse and into the cubicles on either side - she ran out of the department and was never seen again.

When Jane was a student she was sent to the burns unit to help an RN with a new admission. The patient was a prisoner, who'd been accused by another inmate of pedophilia - while other inmates staged a distraction, three men tied him to a chair, covered him with glue, stuck paper over his skin and then flicked lit matches at him until he caught alight. When Jane arrived on the unit he had a CVC in, sutured to his muscle because there was no skin anywhere except his lower legs and both hands. After Jane lifted his head to reposition him, an ear came away on her glove.

[FranEMTnurse, CNA, LPN, EMT-I]

what a horrible thing to have happen to the patient who was set on fire. the first time i experienced maggots of that proportion, it caused me to rethink about eating rice for a long time too. bus now that several years have passed, i especially love fried rice.

[dizzyblue]

Picture this 2200 late shift. Phone call from A & E (or ER if you are in the USA)

"We have an admission for you"

A& E is not supposed to admit to general wards after 2130 (they usually go to the "holding ward" until morning, so we knew this must be a doozy.

A & E - "She is mobile, continent, orientated and alert, she has a lower leg wound that the registrar wants a dermatologist to look at ASAP"

Me - "Why isn't she going to the holding ward?"

A & E - "There isn't any room"

Me - "OK send her up, we'll cope"

So we start to get ready for this admission, put the water jug next to the bed in a six bed bay and all the rest of it when we smell this most disgusting smell! We start to wander around the ward and this smell is getting stronger and stronger. Then we look up and here is a wardsman coming down the hallway with an obese woman in a wheelchair with an enormous number of bluies tied around both legs. He has a mask on but still looks a little worse for wear.

We realise this woman can't be put in a 6 bed bay and have to rearrange beds to get her into a single room.

We do this eventually and I get to take the admission as I was the fool to take this patient at this time anyway. I remove the blanket from around her shoulders and the corners of the blanket stay stiff it was that dirty.

I ask her why she has come to hospital.

She says; "Coz of my legs"

Me; Ok what's wrong with them?"

She says; "They're sore"

Me: "Do you treat them with anything?"

She says; "When they get bad I give them a spray"

Me; "What with?"

She says; "Mortein or something"

At this stage there is a foul smelling semi opaque serous-looking fluid oozing from under the bluies and I know that what I am going to find there is not going to be pretty.

I take the bluies off and the skin underneath is undulating! She had an entire ecosystem living there!! It was horrendous, like something out of a horror movie!

Eventually the derm diagnosed this disease with a long name that excapes me that made her lower legs have skin like a crocodile, it would split occasionally and that is when the bugs would get in. This disease was primarily caused by simple poor hygiene it seems.

Anyway the treatment was to put her in a warm bath and exfoliate her legs. I won't gross you out with those details. Needless to say she wasn't called the Cornflakes lady for nothing!

To top it all off this woman was discharged eventually because of her innappropriate sexual behaviour. She would moan and call us darling when we massaged her lower legs with moisturiser to soften the skin. She would touch us innapropriately and smirk at us.

An all round disgusting person!

We were glad to see the last of her!

reminds me of the guy who came to clinic for a "leg infection"..weighed over 500lbs..when I unwrapped the bandage he had put on himself, the smell of gangrene was obvious..we sent him straight to surgery...

[HollyHobby]

I once had a patient with a blood glucose of 1400 who was still quite alert, so I suppose he was accustomed to levels that high. His white count was also pretty high, but the resident hadn't isolated the source of infection. When I went in to assess the patient, I noticed brown stuff on his pillow.

Gingerly, I lifted up his hair, which was long and didn't appear to have been washed or combed, ever. On the back of his neck was an abscess the size of a softball, leaking brown pus.

I said, "Doesn't your neck hurt?" He said, "yeah". As I was wondering why the gentleman hadn't deemed it important to mention this to the doctors, I noticed that his scalp was a mess of scratches and claw marks. And there were bugs. Jillions of them, scurrying all over his head and across the pillow.

Crazy high blood sugar plus clawing at self with filthy fingernails equals a massive abscess (right down to the spine) requiring radical surgery and 3 months in the ICU.

When I mentioned the lice problem to the nurse who'd given me report on the patient, she said, "Oh, yeah, the people in the ER said they thought he had lice. I forgot to tell you."

I still itch when I think about it.

[FranEMTnurse, CNA, LPN, EMT-I]

Gross out big time! :barf01:

[BlessedMomRN]

Thanks for asking!

I was doing my first CNA clinic in a nursing home. I was assigned to bath a male resident with dementia. I was doing pericare and he reached out to me and started rubbing my hair like he was fantasizing. I almost puked! I ran out of the room and couldn't figure out what to do. The patient was MY INSTRUCTOR'S FATHER!

I decided to ask another student to help me finish the bath. I was so grossed out. I couldn't bring myself to discuss it with my instructor because it was her father.

[iNurseUK, RN]

I once nursed an elderly lady who had come in for a skin graft following a fall and a nasty pre-tibial laceration. This lady had a very refined accent, was well-groomed and was capable of fooling almost all of us into thinking she was fully compos mentis. The night staff insisted that the lady was mad as a box of frogs but all we ever saw on days was a pleasant if occasionally vague elderly lady.

Then the smell started. There was a distinct aroma of poop that seemed to linger near her. We checked her clothing for "accidents" checked the bed, the locker even the patients near her and could find no source. It was a mystery until one morning one of our HCA's was helping her to dress and was asked to look in her handbag for a powder compact.

You see where this is going I guess. A week's worth of poop, neatly wrapped in toilet paper filled her handbag. Our HCA turned green and over the patient's vociferous objections cleaned the bag out.

[FranEMTnurse, CNA, LPN, EMT-I]

I once nursed an elderly lady who had come in for a skin graft following a fall and a nasty pre-tibial laceration. This lady had a very refined accent, was well-groomed and was capable of fooling almost all of us into thinking she was fully compos mentis. The night staff insisted that the lady was mad as a box of frogs but all we ever saw on days was a pleasant if occasionally vague elderly lady.

Then the smell started. There was a distinct aroma of poop that seemed to linger near her. We checked her clothing for "accidents" checked the bed, the locker even the patients near her and could find no source. It was a mystery until one morning one of our HCA's was helping her to dress and was asked to look in her handbag for a powder compact.

You see where this is going I guess. A week's worth of poop, neatly wrapped in toilet paper filled her handbag. Our HCA turned green and over the patient's vociferous objections cleaned the bag out.

She at least wrapped the poop neatly in toilet paper.

[HollyHobby]

iNurseUK, this a bit off topic, but I've never heard the expression "mad as a box of frogs". I love it, and I hope you don't mind if I adopt this as my new favorite catchphrase.

[Asherahh]

Aww, man! I just reached the last page - and I want MORE! I'm not even a nursing student *yet*, but I am loving these stories! Keep 'em comin'! :)

[HollyHobby]

A young nurse on my unit recently took care of T.O., one of our frequent flyers. He has end stage liver failure and is not a candidate for a transplant because he is so noncompliant. He is a greasy, dirty man, bright yellow and with a belly full of fluid. He comes to visit every week or so, nearly comatose with an extraordinarily high ammonia level.

When he wakes up (after we give him enough lactulose to flood the bed) he is a vicious person. He swears, he hits, and is generally the nastiest person I've ever known. He is dirty and mean. Once he's able to walk, he immediately goes AMA.

So this poor nurse, bless her heart, was trying to take care of him, and T.O. deliberately hawked up a huge wad of slimy phlegm and spit it into her mouth.