What's the scariest thing you've ever seen as a nurse?

Zookeeper3 · Jan 31, 2011

brain coming out of craniotomy sutures and the ears. the scary part is it took two days to die like that. i would have wished, and i prayed that death would come quicker. that autonomous heart gets you every time. :crying2:

Zookeeper3 · Jan 31, 2011

Just curious, isn't it policy at your hospital/facility that you ALWAYS check your meds before mixing them with another RN, to ensure you haven't got the wrong drug?

easy to say if you don't work with life and death in seconds and are mixing multiple drips all at the same time, while tending to 50 family members falling out in the room and a crashing patient. Of course the standard is to double check, that s why it was caught. When running frantically to save a life you grab the wrong thing easily, your internal double check system catches it... but you are still scared to your briefs because of "what could have been". That second nurse checking is the one you hug. The post was about the potential... not the procedures in place, which are there. Otherwise that poster would have had a different outcome. In critical care we all have near misses. the poster is simply sharing one. GEEZE...... and the "ALWAYS" in your post.... a touch lecturing to a nurse that had the guts to share it. Not needed at all IMHO a touch beyond what was needed here. OUCH, may you never have a near miss and have to read your response.

klone, MSN, RN · Jan 31, 2011

A 5-minute-long shoulder dystocia with no physician on the hospital premises.

INLPN93 · Jan 31, 2011

The 100 pound soaking wet man who stood all of 5 feet, took his walker and beat a nurse black & blue while the CNA took her 15 min smoke break.

The night I helped another unit literally take a bed apart to remove a lady from the bedrail who was post mortem.

The day I watched the House Supervisor run around the building crying because a nurse who was in drug tx from state got the narc keys to a cart and emptied the Lortabs and disappeared.

The evening a nurse went into the bathroom to shoot up some drugs she stole from the cart and hit an artery. That bathroom looked like a horror movie.

Seeing the: DEA, Attorney General himself not an office appointee, State, and the Labor Board in a facility by Wednesday. A three day period.

Picking up the paper one morning and seeing 9 of my co-workers on the front page after being charged in a neglect case.

When I mention that I've worked in the good, the bad and the ugly of LTC here's some (yes, there's more) of the ugly.

Katie5 · Jan 31, 2011

When I was a 3rd year nursing student, this doctor on the cardiac/renal ward with quite a thick accent, was explaining to this patient how he was going to cut into his heart, do a bypass (or whatever it was), the next day.
After the doctor left the patient (a bloke), he turned to me and said: "I didn't understand a word he just told me. Can you explain what he said?" A nurse told me later, apparently, this was quite a common occurence with this doctor.
There is NO WAY that doctor would be doing surgery on ME if I didn't fully understand what would be happening. I mean, this surgeon had a license to hold a scalpel for crying out loud!
The patient signed the consent form anyway, after the CN explained it all to him.
Scary....

Which is you ask questions.LOL:rolleyes:

General E. Speaking, RN, RN · Jan 31, 2011

Not really scary...had a pt that decided to melt and inject his methodone. All of the flesh around both anticubitals had rotted off requiring an I&D in the OR. The dressing changes were quite painful. You could see every ligament/tendon and part of the bone.

mskate · Jan 31, 2011

This one didn't happen to me, but happened to a co-worker...

This nurse admitted a gang violence GSW to the ICU and left the room briefly to go to the med room and heard "pop pop pop!" and he ran back to his room and his patient was shot to death in the ICU bed by the other guys who came to finish the job! Could you imagine if that nurse hadn't gone to the med room!?!?!

We have had to lock down the unit a few times from insane family members who didn't cope well with traumas and started to tear apart the unit. One time a family shoved our nurse manager into the wall. We have had families try to break down the locked ICU unit doors a couple times. (ghetto level 1 trauma hospitals - holla!)

One of the most disturbing PATIENT thing I have seen is going to be a toss up - The first one was a cardiac patient who was super sick with an open chest. Our medical director wanted to withdraw care, the family didn't want to so his orders were for NO pain medications and NO sedation on this patient, even while we re-packed her chest everyday. He ordered the husband to be in the room to WATCH her suffer to try to manipulate the code status. -- It worked.

The other one was a very mentally disturbed patient who set himself on fire. He burned for a *long* *long* time. When we got the patient to the burn ICU he was a 95% burn, close to 100% and it was so bad he had split like an over cooked hot dog down the front and the back, down the legs.... This patient wasn't only burned but he was CHARRED. He literally looked like a movie prop, I have seen bad burns, but never anything quite so graphically awful. We weren't even able to draw labs on him until he has 12 liters of fluid in him because of the complete lack of plasma... it was really, really bad. The patient, of course, died a few days later.

noahsmama · Jan 31, 2011

One of the most disturbing PATIENT thing I have seen is going to be a toss up - The first one was a cardiac patient who was super sick with an open chest. Our medical director wanted to withdraw care, the family didn't want to so his orders were for NO pain medications and NO sedation on this patient, even while we re-packed her chest everyday. He ordered the husband to be in the room to WATCH her suffer to try to manipulate the code status. -- It worked.

:eek: Wow. I'm sorry, but that's just plain cruel. I understand that sometimes family don't make the decisions we would like them to, and have a hard time letting go, but to order no pain meds and deliberately increase this woman's suffering seems sooooo wrong to me. And how can a doctor "order" the husband to do anything? Even if it was in the pt's best interest for the code status to be changed, this is one case where the end does not, in my opinion, justify the means.

Horseshoe, BSN, RN · Jan 31, 2011

Wow. I'm sorry, but that's just plain cruel. I understand that sometimes family don't make the decisions we would like them to, and have a hard time letting go, but to order no pain meds and deliberately increase this woman's suffering seems sooooo wrong to me. And how can a doctor "order" the husband to do anything? Even if it was in the pt's best interest for the code status to be changed, this is one case where the end does not, in my opinion, justify the means.

I completely agree. That doctor is a sadist and a control freak-I wouldn't want him anywhere near me, my loved ones, or anyone else for that matter.

Biffbradford · Jan 31, 2011

Scary? After you've been in the game so long, I think you become desensitized to stressful situations and it takes a real bad threat to be 'scary'. However, one time we did have an angry husband barricade himself in a patient's ICU room (with glass doors), not letting anyone come near the patient. She had been there for a few months, but was still quite sick, so when we saw her EKG go flat line, we became 'concerned'. Maybe it was just a lead that fell off, but we didn't want to wait 15 minutes for the next automatic blood pressure reading to confirm it or not. :confused: Oh, we had security and the local police there too. It was quite the scene. :rolleyes: In the end, everyone was fine and he was escorted away. Most importantly, I was just beginning a weeks vacation, so I didn't have to deal with it the next day.

mustlovepoodles, RN · Jan 31, 2011

One of the scariest incidents that I ever dealt with happened when I was a fairly young nurse of 2yrs experience. It was the perfect storm. A woman was brought to the ER in the family car with a baby crowning. It was a little hospital and we had no gurney and no doctor in the building. The back seat doors were not operational and I had to climb over the backseat to get to the mom (in a dress and cap, I might add.) I had to deliver the baby onto the backseat with no sterile anything, by the light of the moon. It was 23 degrees outside and steam was rising from the baby's body. I put the baby on her stomach to induce some contractions and shortly delivered the placenta. Did i mention I had no light? Someone brought me a blanket and the husband helped me get the mother over the front seat and into a wheelchair. I had no idea if she was bleeding in the dark, if she was HIV positive , or the extent of her prenatal care. Only after I got her inside did I find out that she was a type 1 diabetic and this was her 11th baby :eek: She actually did very well and was discharged with her baby 2 days later. But I just about had a brown-out!

Incidently, I asked her why she waited so long to come to the hospital. She said she didn't wait. She said she had 3-4 contractions at home and came straight away. Then she told me her LAST baby was also delivered in the car. :uhoh3:

ktwlpn, LPN · Jan 31, 2011

My abusive, drug addicted EX HUSBAND's name on the CENSUS. I was afraid that he would accuse me of sneaking into his room and trying to kill him-at that point I really did not care if he lived or died.He was the type that could never let things go and tried to make trouble for me for a long time after I left him..

I truly believe in Karma-I always seemed to have a holiday or three day weekend whenever he showed up.