People, these really give 2girls1cup a run for its money. Sorry if the link is old hat to you all:
Whatever nurses get paid, it ain’t enough.
Interesting typo in that first post:
… considering how it turned out.
Her “arms around her waste!”
I’ll bet nurses hate when they have to do that.
On of my best friends is a haematology/oncology nurse. Feces and urine is one thing…the details she gave me about a patient with a type of cancer I don’t recall complicated by graft vs. hosts… I could never do her job. This patient was literally falling apart in front of them. Skin peeling off under bandages that had to be changed every few hours over his whole body, basically looking like a severe burn patient, needing to be kept on a heated bed at 40C (IIRC) with the room at the same temp because even then, he was freezing, pain meds cranked up to the max, anitbiotics to the max… Whoever that man had been was gone long before he became my friend’s patient. 
I once made the mistake of going out for sushi with a pair of delivery room nurses who wanted to talk shop.
Put me off my toro, it did … .
That’s a very old thread, but a great one…
Joe
I think the worst “bodily fluids” type situation I’ve ever been in was changing a catheter bag from the daytime leg bag to the overnight bag. The nursing assistant who had worked with this particular individual that morning had taken the night bag off and A) left urine in it and B) left it OPEN, which I thought was a special touch. You learn to keep spare scrubs and what not with you because shit happens, but I still had to put on a pair of surgical booties to run into town for new shoes. Idiot.
I’ve come across some pretty gross stuff (like having a guy fart literally right in my face while I was tending an ulcer on his coccyx; I swear, the force moved my hair) but this was probably near the top of the list. Not like I’ve never been peed on (and crapped on and had to deal with vomit, which is just… ugh) but, unless there’s a disease process that affects it, urine generally doesn’t stink.
Unless it’s been stagnant in a bag in a closet for 10 hours.
My first job out of nursing school was as an orthopedic surgeon’s nurse. We did alot of mundane office stuff, but were in the OR several days a week and saw lots of interesting cases. One that stands out is a young guy who had twisted his knee while climbing a wood fence. He waited a couple of days before coming to the ER, and was immediately set up for surgery, as his knee had swollen to the size of a basketball. When the doc opened it up, nothing came out at first, but he pushed on the sides, and these blood clots the size of golf balls plopped out onto the table. They reminded me of cranberry sauce, and I have never felt the same about Thanksgiving since.
Thanks for the link! I’ve eaten two meals so far while reading through that epic thread… I’ve always known I am destined for such a career. Although deep, maggot-infested, necrotizing wounds would be a challange… I think I’m up to it.
Sorry, I’ve made enough people cry over the years, I’m done telling stories.
I half-gagged my way through some of those (the earwax one early on was awful), but man, post 57 is potential nightmare fuel. People expecting a baby soon need to stay far, far away from that.
The nursing home stories are heartbreaking. Those people who were drinking their pee and playing with their poop were were probably just like us at some point.
I had to learn that most people don’t discuss things like that thread at the dinner table. My mother was a RN, my father an optometrist, and one sister was a radiologist. Horror stories were the order of the day as everyone recounted how their day had gone. My husband’s family blanches at the mention of a drop of blood. Ah, well.
:eek:
Oh holy hell.
:eek::eek::eek:
Thanks for that link. Despite how incredibly disgusting it is, I can’t stop reading the posts.
I’ve seen (and smelled) plenty of gross and disgusting things at work, but I think the 8 lb bezoar that had to be surgically removed from my patient’s stomach probably takes the prize. I’ve had pets that were smaller than that thing.
[quote=“Eyebrows_0f_Doom, post:15, topic:548616”]
The opposite here–I’ve tried three times to read the link, but I keep closing the tab.
I could never, ever be a nurse. Wow.
Yeesh. I got to page 14 and couldn’t keep going. I cannot imagine being a nurse, and I hope I die before I get to the stage of some of those people. Lots of really sad stories there.
Geriatric psych nurse checking in here. I don’t have time to read the whole thread tonight, ( I work at 7 am and should have been asleep 2 hours ago) but one thing I can tell you about nursing.
The superlative case, or “now I’ve seen everything” should be stricken from the vocabulary on completion of the first month of nursing school. Everything I thing I have smelled, seen, heard, palpated, or had on me, no matter how bizzare or foul, is eventually surpassed by something else. Human beings can have many things go very wrong and it is not for the weak to go around smelling/seeing/debriding/ etc.
Nurses need nurse friends, and should only talk shop when dining with such friends who also have been initiated by a baptism of organic human debris.
However I have been known more than once to share gross out stories. Do a search on my profile for the tearm “digging and painting” for one.
My wife was an RN. Here are a few gems. Hope you aren’t eating.
Big rig overturns, guy lays in the crushed cab for 8+ hours, head in the dirt, scalp peeled back. Fix him up, all good. Few days later he says his head itches. Flies are hatching out of his head. They had to re-peel his scalp off.
Guy suicides with a shotgun but it slips. Shots the bottom half of his face off, jaw and all, no nose. She has to repack the dressing and every time she shoves it in, his eyes bulge out. Anyway, they send him home with instructions on how to care for his wounds. He comes back a month later with the exact same dressings on, crusted black and smelling BAD. So they cut a bunch more face off.
Guy driving a motorcycle hits a parked car going fast. He’s over the handlebars, dead. His girl does a split on the handlebars. As in SPLIT. She pulled through, but not really a good end result.
She had a bunch like that, split personality giants (Big Ben/Baby Ben) who beat the crap out of every man he saw but was kind and shy towards women, and a 500+ pound pimp named Tiny whose employee was uh, riding his knee in his hospital bed…