What is your Nursing Kryptonite?

You know, your weakness ... your one "thing" that makes your stomach flip over when you see a patient with it/them/whatever. I had my first "maggot" patient recently (maggots living where they shouldn't be, you understand), and it really grossed many of my coworkers out. I was relieved to find that the maggots didn't bother me ... apparently my only Achilles heel thus far is nasty dentures, LOL -- EWWWWW.

When I was a tech, I had a nurse offer me $5 to suction a patient because sputum makes her queasy.

Specializes in CEN.
There's a lot that grosses me out a little, but the one thing that follows me home and makes me feel contaminated is crusty, flaky, shedding skin. Like when you move the patients and there's a human-shaped print on the bed of skin flakes, or you take off a sock and flakes burst in to the air, or you wipe their back with a washcloth and the washcloth comes back covered in dead skin.

Smells, suction noise, make me gag momentarily but I can move on. The skin stuff makes me feel dirty for DAYS.

Worse yet, when you take off those socks and the flakes come loose I feel like I'm inhaling them! I try to cough them out when I leave the room but I would keep imaging that the flakes were just moving deeper down my digestive system...no more corn flakes for me :barf02:

Specializes in Family Nurse Practitioner.

That reminds me of when I took off a female patients diaper and I inhaled some of her powder....eewwww gross. I immediately rinsed out my mouth with some mouthwash.

Body fluids in my eye. Gross

The death poops

Specializes in ER.

I made it to page three. Now I have the disgusting heebie jeebies. You people are SICK.

Specializes in EMS, ED, Trauma, CEN, CPEN, TCRN.

The only time I ever vomited at work was my own fault -- it was a horrible day, we had two codes coming in at the same time, and I chugged a chocolate protein shake in about 3 seconds. I was bagging one code, and I suddenly knew I was going to hurl. I looked at one of my coworkers and said politely, "Can you take over bagging this guy?" She looked at me and said I was a lovely shade of pale green! I went to the staff lounge, up came the shake, I pinched some color back into my cheeks (or my charge nurse was going to banish me to sit down for a while!), and went back to the code. :D I never drink those things that fast anymore!!

I had a patient with moldy dentures ... in her mouth. That made me queasy for a minute. Ugh!! Maggots living in patients? Not a problem! LOL. Go figure.

Specializes in Peds Homecare.
I would have to say mine is when people are hacking and coughing up phlegm, that's the one and only thing that will cause me to gag. :uhoh3:

Yes that^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^:barf01:

Sputum.... I'm better now, but when I first started, even just HEARING the gurgling a someone being suctioned brought me to my knees.

The ONLY time (so far) I have ever vomited in a patient's room (or at work period for that matter) happened when I was suctioning and doing oral care on a little old nursing home lady. It looked like she hadn't been suctioned in months (we have over a dozen nursing homes in the area, unfortunately only 1 is any good). Anyway, I had just a few minutes prior drank my pre-med pass snack of chocolate milk... When I was finishing suctioning I got a huge chunk of indescribable gunk (half dried, about the size of a 2x2 )stuck to the tip of the yankeur... I quickly handed off the yankeur to my tech (threw it actually) and emptied the contents of my stomach into the trash can.

Fortunately the patient had no idea what was going on. I would have felt bad.

That literally made me gag as I read it.

Specializes in multispecialty ICU, SICU including CV.
BONES!

bones that stick out of the skin, broken bones that crunch together when you touch them, joints out of alignments, I paid someone $5 to take an IO out of one of my patients. I am thinking of getting some therapy!

I am with you on this. Halos and external fixators still give me the creeps. I can do it, but I have a really hard time.

Specializes in Med/Surg, LTAC, Critical Care.

You know how God decides who will be a nurse and who will be a Resp Therapist?

He tosses both groups into a toilet bowl full of BM...He then hocks a luggy in there.. Whoever ducks, is the nurse.

Can someone explain to me what the big thing with phlegm/trach suctioning thing is? I say this as someone about to start NS, so clearly I've never done it myself, but I've volunteered in the MICU and watched trach suctioning being done and it didn't bother me in the least... in fact, I found the sound to be so incredibly satisfying. Am I weird? Or is there something else that's going to sneak up on me? Some awful smell or surprise or something? :p

you are weird.

and there you have it.

Specializes in EMS, ED, Trauma, CEN, CPEN, TCRN.

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Hee hee!

What can I say, I was inspired by my newest certification: Certified Maggot Wrangler (CMW). :D

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