What is your worst visitor story?

[nordie]

What is the worst thing a visitor has done?

[Forest2]

I really can't think of any worse than another, Just normal ones. Eating the patients food. Allowing baby to crawl on floor. Messing with the IV and other equipment. Just general misbehavior. I am all for limiting visitors to set hours and set number of people and having one spokesperson so the nurse doesn't have to repeat the same thing over and over.

[CaffeinePOQ4HPRN, BSN, MSN, LPN, RN]

The worst thing a visitor has done - EX. 1

An 87 year old patient with dysphagia and severe cognitive issues r/t advanced dementia. His dietary orders = pureed meals, thickened fluids; this was in his care plan and his family was fully aware + received on-going education and training. One evening he had a visit from his middle aged daughter who was adamant that she could do a better job than us nurses. While she was sitting at bedside, she decided it would be a great idea to feed her father hot dogs and spaghetti. We caught her but by then he had already aspirated. He got pneumonia, he never recovered. I'd say that's the worst. Family members like her who have egos and meddle in turn endanger/cause harm to their loved ones.

The worst thing a visitor has done - EX. 2

Another "visitor episode" includes a patient's grand-daughter who was a #nursingstudent and thus thought she knew better than the floor nurses. Her sweet ole'gramps was on isolation for C. diff.. She felt that the PPE and isolation precautions we had implement were overkill and would disregard them when our backs were turned in favor of hand-washing only. She ended up acquiring a C. diff. infection from her grampy , but not before spreading those lovely spores all around the unit. We were on lock-down for over a month because of her actions, that was fun . In the end she tried to blame the floor nurses... As if we have control over stupidity coupled with idle hands

[sevensonnets]

Patient on a morphine drip had two unbelievably obnoxious daughters, one of them armed with a cane. The doctor and I walked into the room at the same time and the one with the cane had somehow obtained a syringe and was trying to pull from the tubing. She swung around with her cane and hit the doctor in the shin. Security and police called, visitor was escorted off the property. Morphine drip was D/C'd, patient discharged and fired by her doctor simultaneously, and the other daughter given 2 hours to get her out of the hospital. She took her home.

[KatieMI, BSN, MSN, RN]

What a fun thread!

I love your comment, but I find it rather sad that health care workers are exposed to such amount of entitlement, rudeness and direct abuse while being virtually unprotected.

One loving one today promised to sue me for explaining that at about being close to 100 years of age her dear grandmother is just plain getting old and there is no pills or surgeries to "fix 'er (VERY many issues) right up".

[Munch]

Ive had a patients visitor try to pick the lock on the PCA box to try and get to the big bag of dilaudid hanging. I think he was trying to pick it with a bobby pin I can't be sure. The patient he was visiting was sleeping.

I work at an inner city hospital so a lot of people are on drugs or sell drugs or both. One patient of mine had 3 cell phones at the bedside and they were always going off all the time at all hours. He had many visitors going in and out and all of his visitors couldn't get out of his room fast enough. One was found as an OD in the bathroom in the lobby. That was very sad.

I've had others try and fiddle with the sharps container. One girl came to visit her boyfriend and they were crushing up his PO oxycodone and shooting it into his line. He earned himself a sitter fast. Another guy had his dealer bring him a few bags of heroin that he dropped on the floor..not very smart. The doctor gave him 5 minutes to get out or he was calling the cops.

Had a visitor go into every patients room that was sleeping and tried to steal the food on their trays. Had a patient on the floor that was in a bad car accident and his wife came to see him everyday after she got off work. One day she came just as her husbands side piece was leaving..oops. I felt like that I was on TV. I had another patient who was on deaths door with stage 4 ovarian cancer. Her children were fighting over her will and assets and she wasn't even dead yet!

I can go on and on. Very sad stuff. Bad behavior knows no bounds.

[Ruby Vee, BSN]

I love your comment, but I find it rather sad that health care workers are exposed to such amount of entitlement, rudeness and direct abuse while being virtually unprotected.

One loving one today promised to sue me for explaining that at about being close to 100 years of age her dear grandmother is just plain getting old and there is no pills or surgeries to "fix 'er (VERY many issues) right up".

Yeah, I wish we could tazer the visitors sometimes.

There was the visitor in eastern Washington state when I worked there years ago who came in toting a six-shooter (with a freakishly long barrel) and claiming he was going to "fix 'er right up" with it. Wife was in acute renal failure, on a ventilator and many vasoactive drips and just was not doing well. The man also claimed he was going to "fix up that damned nurse from yesterday who wanted to discuss end of life care." I alerted my manager who was very sweet but just a little bit dim. (I think she got the job by virtue of being the only applicant who wasn't "a strong ICU personality.").

"That's OK," Sue said, smiling her sweetest smile and tilting her blonde head charmingly to the side. "He's from Montana. They carry guns there."

That answer didn't sit very well with me, nor did it with Security when I called them. When they came up to investigate they found that he was also totin' a hunting knife and that the travel mug he had constantly within reach did have coffee in it, as he'd claimed, but it was probably more than half Jack Daniels. Not a good combination. They took him out to his car to drop the weapons off before he'd be allowed to come back to visit, and found his car full of Jack Daniels bottles -- several of them full, but most of them empty -- and weapons: knives, handguns, a few rifles and one very illegal shotgun. By the time I started my dialysis run at 9:00 am or so, the husband was in jail.

It was a long dialysis run -- about 8 hours -- and he was back at the bedside with the travel mug but sans weapons before I got her off dialysis. I had to run a second patient (4 hour run) so I was trying to finish up and get to the next patient. (Security met him at the door, supposedly ensured that he wasn't carrying weapons, and escorted him to the unit.). The nurse who was supposed to pick up the patient so I could go and do the second run flatly refused to "go near that insane situation". In the end, Sue (who had claimed the gun wasn't such a big deal because the visitor was from Montana) ended up taking care of the patient until the end of the shift.

Another time, a visitor came in with a huge German Shepard he claimed was a service dog. The dog was filthy and had a huge chain around his neck rather than a collar and leash and certainly no vest to identify him as a working dog. The male travel nurse allowed the dog and the visitor into the room to see the patient. I was charge that day -- at the charge nurse meeting off the unit where we planned for transfers, admissions, etc. I walked back on the unit to see Tom the Traveler backed up against the window of the patient's room with the dog snapping and snarling at him and the visitor screaming "Get him, Booger! Get that ******* ****** who's molesting Dad! You get him!"

Sue, who was only about 5 foot nothing and 90 pounds came barreling around the corner from her office and before I could even make sense of the scene, had gone into the room, muscled aside the visitor and taken the dog's chain into her hands and pulled. The dog backed off, sat down and lolled his tongue at her. The visitor started squealing that Sue was "ruining his attack dog," and insisting that he needed to talk to the manager because he didn't want no ******** ******** molesting his dad.

"I'm the manager, Sir," she proclaimed. "And I'm calling the police." She did. Evidently chaining a dirty dog is a worse crime than threatening hospital staff and patients with a .357 handgun!

[HalfBoiled, BSN, RN]

I dislike family members who are also nurses from different hospital that bombard you with a million questions.

Especially when you got report 30 mins ago and questions were not pertinent to that patient's care.

After a working 1-2 years I strongly believe they are just showing off their nursing knowledge to their own family.

[Julius Seizure]

Parent of sedated PICU patient who I guess really liked benzos. Knew that the syringe of Versed would beep if it was taken off of the pump, so they apparently unscrewed the tubing and sucked some med out of the big syringe with a needle, and then reattached the IV tubing. Wasn't discovered until the syringe was nearing empty, and the nurse that went to change it out discovered that the syringe had 10ml of air in it...about to slowly infuse into the patient.

***

Father of PICU infant on ventilator. After hearing a toilet flush, he was told that unfortunately he would need to use the visitors restroom instead of using the commode in the back corner of the ICU room (there are no walls/doors, or even curtains).

Later that night, through the window, he is seen moving the beside recliner around, apparently doing some rearranging. And then a few minutes later, a toilet flushes.

"Sir, you still cannot use that commode, even if you do it while hiding behind the recliner."

***

Father of a different PICU patient. Didn't see a problem with sleeping in only his boxers in the bedside recliner. After all, he was mostly covered by a thin blanket...until he needed to stand up and move out of the way.

***

Father of yet another PICU patient. Was a cocky adult cardiothoracic surgeon who didn't respect or think much of nurses in general. Enough said.

[CelticGoddess, BSN, RN]

Ive had a patients visitor try to pick the lock on the PCA box to try and get to the big bag of dilaudid hanging. I think he was trying to pick it with a bobby pin I can't be sure. The patient he was visiting was sleeping.

I work at an inner city hospital so a lot of people are on drugs or sell drugs or both. One patient of mine had 3 cell phones at the bedside and they were always going off all the time at all hours. He had many visitors going in and out and all of his visitors couldn't get out of his room fast enough. One was found as an OD in the bathroom in the lobby. That was very sad.

I've had others try and fiddle with the sharps container. One girl came to visit her boyfriend and they were crushing up his PO oxycodone and shooting it into his line. He earned himself a sitter fast. Another guy had his dealer bring him a few bags of heroin that he dropped on the floor..not very smart. The doctor gave him 5 minutes to get out or he was calling the cops.

Had a visitor go into every patients room that was sleeping and tried to steal the food on their trays. Had a patient on the floor that was in a bad car accident and his wife came to see him everyday after she got off work. One day she came just as her husbands side piece was leaving..oops. I felt like that I was on TV. I had another patient who was on deaths door with stage 4 ovarian cancer. Her children were fighting over her will and assets and she wasn't even dead yet!

I can go on and on. Very sad stuff. Bad behavior knows no bounds.

I've worked at both a rural (critical access hospital) and what can only be described as an inner city teaching hospital (but not in a big city) The teaching hospital had a crack house across the street from the parking garage. It amazed me what lengths patients would go to to get drugs. I mentioned the woman who shot up in her permacath. She died. (Renal failure related to drug use) We had to have several people have their central lines DC'd because of drug use, and these were patients on IV abx and other vesicants.

It can be an experience, can't it. I was lucky that the teaching hospital I worked at had armed security and the only hired retired military and former cops. And because they paid more than any police department in the area, we had good security!

[KelRN215, BSN, RN]

Had a Gypsy (self-described) family that would routinely visit our hospital due to the patriarchs health. They would steal everything from the chairs to the mounted TVs to the napkin dispensers. It was super odd but when 20-30 family members descend upon a unit there is not much you can do.

Went so far as to unscrew the crappy art from the walls.

Security finally put restrictions to only allow 2 at a time on the premises and always escorted. They would always try to sneak in.

It would be comical if it were not so sad.

We had a family like this when I worked in the hospital too. The mother was pregnant when one of her children became our patient. She went into labor one night at the bedside and stripped down naked/thought she was going to deliver her baby on our floor. We put her in a wheelchair and sent her to the adult hospital next door. The next day her husband brought her placenta over to our floor and asked if they could store it in our fridge.

These people regularly raided our conference room and stole food left over from inservices. They also used to beg for money outside the hospital and, when the local Ronald McDonald House was under construction and was putting people up in hotels, they LIED to people on the streets telling them that the hospital and oncology clinic "kicked them and their child with cancer out". Then our floor and the pedi oncology clinic had to wield many calls from outraged strangers who believed them.

[Elysianna, BSN, RN]

The husband of a patient with dementia was spending the night at the bedside. The NST and I walked in to turn her just in time to catch him backhanding her across the face, hard enough to knock her partially out of her bed. The NST grabbed the husband, I rescued our patient from falling the rest of the way, and grabbed my phone to call security. The husband eventually left in cuffs.

I have to say I was wildly impressed with the NST's ability to keep his cool. He very calmly strong-armed the husband from the room, then stood quietly talking to the husband until security could arrive. I was so furious that I was shaking, but he was cool as a cucumber. I wish I had that much grace under fire.

[NurseNinja1990]

I used to work in detox and patient's families brought in drugs all the time. The two big ones I can remember was one lady brought in a teddy bear stuffed with 50+ klonopin tablets which were then parceled out $5 a pop. Had to drug screen the entire unit and the amount of paperwork was a nightmare.

Same unit, different week, a woman brought her boyfriend a syringe full of heroin and I found him passed out in the bathroom with the needle sticking out of his arm. After I narcanned him and he came to, his first words were "I didn't do anything!". Serious props to anyone who can stay in that specialty, I jumped to psych the minute I could and never looked back.