What is your weakness?

[StrwbryblndRN]

Hi everyone,

I am relatively new here. I spent the last year reading allnurses.com and recently registered and would like to know what is your weakness regarding medical care.

Everyone, at least that I know, has a weakness. Something that just makes them queasy. Some people say they can't handle sputum of any kind and others seem to get weak in the knees when they see broken bones. (I knew a ER nurse who admitted to this)

I tend to get a little woozy when someone palpates my inner arm to look for a vein. It even happens if I think about it too much. It is not the needle. I had them in my hand and does not do a thing to me. I can deal with anything else. Granted I am still a student so I have not experienced everything.

So, what does it for you? Inquiring minds want to know.

[zudy]

And I forgot this one....any wound that has maggots in it. I just hate seeing that! Actually, any time any bugs fall off a pt it is gross.

[StrwbryblndRN]

I have to agree about the bugs. The minute I see anything crawl from underclothes or hair makes me itch and dance like they are all over me. Then I can't get my mind off it.

Yet if I see any bug on the wall for example (except small roaches and anything worm like) I do not think much of it and can take care of getting rid of it without flinching. It is just something about bugs on the body that get me.

[Elvish, BSN, DNP, RN, NP]

I thought I wouldn't be able to handle ingrown toenailectomies but when I went to work at a community health center where we did several a day I grew to love them. The doc that was really good at them would go from start to finish (after anesthetizing, of course) in 15 seconds, no lie. I know I'm probably sick in the head but I grew to miss them after I left that place.

[hikernurse]

Dirty bottoms. Not the poopy ones, just the generally unclean--not that the pt's can always help it; but I always want to find a way to get them under running water, not just cleaned with a basin.

Urine, especially when it's a bit concentrated. We have the toilets that rinse as they flush and just the thought of all that stuff--urine, emesis, stool, JP drainage--aerosolizing (sp) makes me queasy. Of course, now that I'm a nurse I don't have to do that CNA kind of stuff anymore--JUST KIDDING!

[Agnus]

I can handle any body fluid or excrement. But when patients and lay people seem to thing that I have a personal facination with bodily fluids and exrement it I tend to loose it.

Like the person who blows thier nose and wants to show me. Or caught up some phlem and wants me to examin it. Or wants me to identify partially digested food in thier stool.

PLEASE. Yes there are times I need to see your stool for myself. I may need a specimin of some sort. I am not at all interisted in you snot nor in analizing the different colors in it. Because I asked if you are caughing up anything and asked what it looks like does not mean that every time you cough someting up from now on that I want to see it. I DO NOT.

Your excrement is more a facination to you than to anyone else. Some people get so fixated like infants who are facinated with thier own poop.

Then there are those who feel it is OK to discuss these thing with me out side of the health care setting and out side of the nurse pt. relationship.

I was horrified one day when a neighbor in the post office in a very loud voice started (without my showing interest) describing her husbands bowel habits. everyone was staring at me. I was not interested. I had to very firmly tell here that this was neither the place nor time to discuss this, and if she needed some thing from me that I would visit her and then we could talk.

She did not.

People seem to think that because I am a nurse it is ok to talk about anything. I am not interested in your bodily functions at all.

[MALE*RN*777]

My weakness is that if I can't do something 100% I don't want to do it. Don't tell me to do something half (you know what) just to get it done.

[oignurse]

Definitely sputum. I can take feces, vomit, urine, blood, bile. Just hearing really productive sputum makes me want to immediately gag.

[lily_lover]

I work in the OR, so it takes quite a bit for me to become queasy. The worst was when we excised a dermoid cyst-that thing was full of hair and it had teeth as well, and to top it all off, it was full of yellowish thick fluid-I shudder thinking about it.