Your most annoying, obnoxious family member stories

[JDZ344]

Give them to me!

Here is a contender for mine: We have open bays in our hospital, not private rooms unless you are isolated. So its the middle of the night but this patient has just been admitted so the daughter is staying a while until we get her settled in. She walks over to the patients bed opposite, UNPLUGS HER IV PUMP and PLUGS IN HER CELL PHONE TO CHARGE. The RN, alerted by the beeping, tells her she can not plug her cell in and she most definitely can not unplug anything that is already plugged in. The daughter ends up pitching such a fit about HAVING to charge her phone that we get security to escort her out. You guessed it- she wrote an official complaint!

Any family member horror stories you want to share?

[Kooky Korky, BSN, RN]

Susie would you want your daughter or son sniffing your bottom? Seriously? I mean we do need to vent occasionally about the looney things loved ones do or we will go insane. I think that those women needed a reality check. If I EVER found out my son was sniffing my butt to see if I needed to be changed then I would want someone to do exactly what this nurse did by telling him to knock it off.

A butt-sniffing son is preferable to a bum full of boo. ROFLMBO

[Orca, ADN, ASN, RN]

A couple come to mind. The first one, female patient on a geropsych unit. The patient was not difficult to care for, but her son and daughter-in-law scrutinized everything that the staff did. They became indignant when I asked them to leave the room while we changed the bed after the patient soiled herself. I was at the nurse station charting when the son handed me his cell phone. They had called the psychiatrist and told him God knows what. The exasperated doctor told me to just apologize to them and be done with it. I told him, "With all due respect, sir, I will not do that, because we have done nothing wrong."

Patient on my unit in a rehabilitation hospital. She was the mother of one of our doctors. Mom herself was a pleasure to take care of. Son, I was ready to punch after the first hour. When he wasn't there, mom was very patient and pleasant. When son was there, he was demanding that we drop everything that we were doing to immediately fill her water pitcher, get her new linens, etc. She bumped her nightstand and got a skin tear on her hand, and he was going to bring in a microsurgeon to fix it. He was apparently meddling in her orders as well, because the attending physician finally told him that if he didn't shut up and butt out, she would drop the case.

[txspadequeenRN, BSN, RN]

LAWD!!!

[Delia37, MSN]

So many!!

One of the worse ones was when we admitted a long term facility, very contracted, trach/vent dependent patient in the ICU for "seizures". However, the only one who ever usually witnessed the so called seizures was her husband. That pt was in the ICU for a long time, mainly due to her many combabilities and for being so tasky (...and the nursing home she came from, refused to take her back due to the husband). He would micromanage everything (it would take almost 45mins to pass her meds, because he wanted it crushed and given in a certain order). When the case manager was able to find an accepting facility to transfer her out, the husband wasn't happy about it. So, the day before she was supposed to be transferred out, she mysteriously coded. The patient happened to be on con't video monitoring for agitation, and the husband was observed injecting something in the IV. At that point, risk management (who were already following that patient) was able to place a restraining visitation order against the husband.

[KatieMI, BSN, MSN, RN]

Very sweet but deeply demented lady was brought in unit as a visitor accompanied by her much younger female relative. She was in WC, they both had "visitor" stickers. A little confusion happened as patient they intended to visit was just transferred in another unit. The younger relative was then seen walking in corridor alone asking for a restroom. When in 3 or so hours another patient was wheeled into an empty unit's room from ER, the WC with the old lady in it was found in restroom. The lady was disheveled and dirty with a good degree of malnutrition and knew no more than her name and name of her "granddaughter". So the old dear was taken to ER and duly admitted for "dehydration". Since she had absolutely no documents and no knowledge, there was a month long effort by SW, police, public advertisement, etc. to identify the lady who was otherwise marked as "Mary Doe" all that time. The efforts came to nothing, there were no fingerprints, nobody noticed a car they had came on, so the lady was pronounced "ward of the State" and sent to a benevolent Christian SNF which admitted her without as much as verified date of birth and SSN.

A whole month after that, or over three months after finding the patient, the younger relative appeared in the unit and asked about her grandma. She became belligerent with staff who at that point underwent like 70% turnover and had no idea about the story. Threw a massive wheeled chair on staff, broke a computer, yelled like a wounded wild animal and was taken out by security in handcuffs directly to police station. She, apparently, was driving over 100 miles with her grandma in order to abandon her like that so she could go cruising, then Vegasing, then continue with her life till she ran out of money and remembered grandma's SSI checks. She really thought that the hospital will just take care of grandma while she was occupied elsewhere for whatever period of time. Yes, and the patient they initially came to "visit" was randomly found on Facebook. There will be at least one Mr. Williams in a hospital at a time.

[KatieMI, BSN, MSN, RN]

On 7/14/2018 at 5:32 PM, Amelia Bedelia said:

Had to blow out candles I found burning in my pt's room- sent them home with the family and explained why they are a hazard.

One thing I will never forget:

A nurse, who was VERY corpulent and normally rather slow moving passed by a room in the corridor a few days before Christmas. Then, suddenly, he went pretty much directly airborne like a helicopter on vertical takeoff and did a lateral/high jump which would be looking good on Olympics while yelling at the very top of his very large lungs:

- everybody OUT!!!!

He spotted a whole windowsill of candles burning less than 2 feet from high flow oxygen machine running 80% flow.

[TriciaJ, RN]

On 2/6/2020 at 3:43 PM, KatieMI said:

One thing I will never forget:

A nurse, who was VERY corpulent and normally rather slow moving passed by a room in the corridor a few days before Christmas. Then, suddenly, he went pretty much directly airborne like a helicopter on vertical takeoff and did a lateral/high jump which would be looking good on Olympics while yelling at the very top of his very large lungs:

- everybody OUT!!!!

He spotted a whole windowsill of candles burning less than 2 feet from high flow oxygen machine running 80% flow.

Don't leave us hanging! Did he run in the room and shut off the oxygen?

[KatieMI, BSN, MSN, RN]

5 hours ago, TriciaJ said:

Don't leave us hanging! Did he run in the room and shut off the oxygen?

As far as I remember, someone from the family got out and asked what was the deal with signal lights going on, doors being shut, everybody abandoning everything and starting to drag beds to the fire exit, etc., according to Code Fire Level 1 plus calling hospital security team. They were yelled at by someone to go splash water on those candles NOW, and later they got even more from security guys and firefighters who did not have to abide by nursing professional ethics and so used all the appropriate and very politically incorrect English expressions (someone called 911 as well).

Patient was discharged to "reserve" SNF bed immediately (the kind of one ot two SNF beds per county which must admit patients in acute social situations - like dependent senior who was taken out of his or her burning house unharmed and has absolutely no relatives or other support. Sadly, it is a pretty common situation). Family was terribly upset because they "just have no idea" and were sending one complain after another for a good few months after.

[Orca, ADN, ASN, RN]

On 2/2/2020 at 11:24 PM, Delia37 said:

The patient happened to be on con't video monitoring for agitation, and the husband was observed injecting something in the IV.

Seems to me that this is a potential criminal issue that could have been prosecuted.

[Delia37, MSN]

On ‎4‎/‎23‎/‎2020 at 7:47 AM, Orca said:

Seems to me that this is a potential criminal issue that could have been prosecuted.

Adult protective service became involved at that point, prompting an investigation; however, she was eventually transferred to a long term facility...not sure what was the outcome.

[No Stars In My Eyes]

2022~Just read this site and realized how very glad I was to have retired 5 years ago.

I walked in to a home for a week-end Home Health visit with a new patient and 5, count'em, FIVE family members jumped on me, blaming ME about something another nurse had done or said on a previous day, and they were all VERY upset about it, all talking louder and louder over each other, wanting to be heard. I held up my arms and said, "WHOA! WHOA! This is the first time I have ever stepped into this house, I don't know any of you OR the patient, or anything about what you are telling me. How about one at a time, without yelling?"

They did finally apologize to me, but their reaction upon my arrival just BLEW me away!

Had a friend who once described the feelings of a person walking into a situation such as this, as "suddenly being hit between the eyes with a cold, dead, wet squirrel."

Yup: WHAM! .....huh?????? What the...????