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!)
I had a new (48 hours post-motorcycle-accident) paraplegic patient shart in my face as I was cleaning him up during orientation in my first nursing job. He had no sensation down there, and we had given him a suppository laxative.
Early on, I had developed the bad habit of dealing with smelly tasks with my mouth open in order to reduce how much I was forced to smell.
Thankfully, I didn't get any in my mouth, but it came close.
Pretty mild compared to some of these stories, I know.
Like many of these posts, my ickiest moment involves poop. I was a new grad LPN (had been there about 6 months), and working at an LTAC. The higher acuity patients were upstairs and they were very short staffed due to a call off. I offered to go up, and was given a patient who had a rectal catheter. It had to be irrigated every few hours. One nurse showed me how. I went in the second time to do it myself and met resistance when I tried to insert water. So, I put some pressure on the syringe, and SMACK! Back came an enormous amount of watery, multi-colored, poo all over me, from head to toe. I screamed out loud and every nurse came running thinking my patient coded. What a laugh they had when they saw I was covered in s***. Because we were so short, I cleaned up as much as possible, put on a patient gown, and finished the shift. But all night long I kept spitting, over and over again, thinking I got it in my mouth! When I got home, I stepped out of everything on my front porch, left it all sitting out there until I finished showering for an hour, lol. I think I brushed my teeth for an additional 45 minutes! I just thought about this when the other night I had my first patient with a fecal management system. I jokingly announced that if it had to be irrigated, I'm quitting right now.
I was pulled from the ICU to the ED to help with an influx of critical traumas. I was assigned to go in the CT scanner and assist with a massive head trauma. I was hanging blood and blood products as fast as I could on the Level1 blood infuser. A new cooler of blood came in the room and I walked around the back of the scanner and slipped in something on the floor. I looked down and yep, you guessed it, grey matter! The woman was herniating through a skull fracture. Poor lady died a short time later.
Here's an OB story for you. I was working Labor and delivery around 1988 or so- just after AIDS became a focus. So we started garbing for deliveries like hazmat workers-hats, gowns, gloves, shoe covers, face shields that covered your whole face but were open at the top. One of the docs was sitting at the foot of a delivery bed waiting for the pt to push and when she did her water broke like a tsunami- hit his mask and went up and over it-filled the thing up- he was drowning in amniotic fluid. Really gross.
As a CNA: Confused, gravely disabled patients wearing diapers who dug into dirty diapers, then swatted at me with stool covered hands. Stool would fly all over the place as I dodged, bobbed and weaved trying to change patients.
As a nurse I now work with a different population and have different responsibilities.
I was fresh out of nursing school but had been a medic for 5-6 years and LTACs were a new thing. I was working at one since I had the medic experience and there was this lady who had severe abd cancer and for "comfort" the physician did a full pelvic evacuation and removed everything from diaphragm down.
We did daily dressing changes packing the space (opening was weirdly retro peritoneal) and we had to keep the spine moist. And slowly the cavity began to rot and fill with foul smelling drainage.
I am not easily swayed by smells but this was the worst thing I ever smelled.
This is the one patient that made me go into hospice (from ER to hospice in under 6 months) and because with every dressing change (even with conscious sedation) she would say "Por Favor Matame" ("Please Kill Me") this was the reason I so strongly believe in physician assisted death with dignity.
I was fresh out of nursing school but had been a medic for 5-6 years and LTACs were a new thing. I was working at one since I had the medic experience and there was this lady who had severe abd cancer and for "comfort" the physician did a full pelvic evacuation and removed everything from diaphragm down.
We did daily dressing changes packing the space (opening was weirdly retro peritoneal) and we had to keep the spine moist. And slowly the cavity began to rot and fill with foul smelling drainage.
I am not easily swayed by smells but this was the worst thing I ever smelled.
This is the one patient that made me go into hospice (from ER to hospice in under 6 months) and because with every dressing change (even with conscious sedation) she would say "Por Favor Matame" ("Please Kill Me") this was the reason I so strongly believe in physician assisted death with dignity.
How horrific. That poor woman. Totally understand your viewpoint and decision to move to hospice.
Here's an OB story for you. I was working Labor and delivery around 1988 or so- just after AIDS became a focus. So we started garbing for deliveries like hazmat workers-hats, gowns, gloves, shoe covers, face shields that covered your whole face but were open at the top. One of the docs was sitting at the foot of a delivery bed waiting for the pt to push and when she did her water broke like a tsunami- hit his mask and went up and over it-filled the thing up- he was drowning in amniotic fluid. Really gross.
Hope they rethought the whole hole in the top of the suit thing, then!
I work in a retail health clinic in a grocery store and we have our own bathrooms separate from the public bathrooms in the store. It's technically only for patients, clinic staff, and the such, but we let the pharmacy staff and the occasional pharmacy customer use it if they are waiting on script as we share a waiting area with the pharmacy. So we leave the door open. It's usually not a big deal. But then some little old asian dude found it and blew it up. Literally. Feces everywhere. All over the toilet, walls, sink, and floor. I'm not sure what he did or how it got ALL the way up on the sink, but it was an explosion of diarrhea. He then non-nonchalantly closed the door and walked away. My FNP watched him close the door and got suspicious. She went to look and there it was. She came to my desk and told me to look at the bathroom and I went and looked, saw it, walked back to my desk... looked at her and said, "Why?! How?!" We then went to clean it up and it had a grainy consistency like whatever he ate didn't digest fully. I couldn't stop gagging. I usually have an iron stomach and have changed the stinkiest of briefs at past jobs, but the consistency of this made me wanna hurl. It wouldn't come up off the floor unless I picked it up with a paper towel. It was terrible.
Recently, we had a new admit who ended up buying himself a ventilator really quickly because he was not breathing well at all. All during the intubation, and while the physician was dropping a central line, everyone was commenting on how huge and weirdly shaped the patient's nose was. After everyone else left the room, I decided to investigate further and squeezed it. What I found was never-ending whiteheads that smelled like rotting fecal matter, so I deduced pretty quickly that the size of the nose was probably due to a cyst or something right under the surface. No matter how much I squeezed, more pus-like material came out. By the end of the shift, I'd had at least five coworkers in the room squeezing on the patient's nose, because we are all freaks like that on my unit.
One time when I squeezed, I finally hit a well of something that sprayed everywhere and of course really smelled terrible. I ended up walking around the room to do something else, but noticed I was still smelling that necrotic fecal smell. I was wearing a surgical mask because the patient was r/o influenza, so on a hunch I took my mask off and looked at it... and there was a large amount of pus spray across my mask. If I hadn't been wearing that mask, I would have had that guy's nose cyst juice in my mouth. I have never been so grateful for a mask in my life.
Neural
56 Posts
I had a new (48 hours post-motorcycle-accident) paraplegic patient shart in my face as I was cleaning him up during orientation in my first nursing job. He had no sensation down there, and we had given him a suppository laxative.
Early on, I had developed the bad habit of dealing with smelly tasks with my mouth open in order to reduce how much I was forced to smell.
Thankfully, I didn't get any in my mouth, but it came close.
Pretty mild compared to some of these stories, I know.