I have always said that nursing is the only profession in the world where you can be up past your elbows in liquid shit at 3 am on Christmas morning. And I know it from experience.
That was NOT a fun shift. I try not to think about it too much, even 24 years later.
My god…if I’d had half of these things happen to me, I’d probably be found later curled up on the floor in a fetal position, weeping.
Hmmm, it’s just not a good shift if I don’t have blood on one shoe and vomit on the other.
I currently have a patient who will not leave his feces in his brief. Fortunately, he usually has nice formed ones, easy for either nursing or housekeeping to pick up off the floor. He gets like this especailly in the morning when we all have other patients to care for, and before we can get about 4 or 5 of us to hold him still to change him and get him dressed.
Yesterday I went into the day room and there was a perfect Stonehenge of poops in a circle.
I was wondering if a bunch of intestinal druids were coming out to perform a ceremony. I tried to persuade a co worker to take a picture, she thought it was too gross a subject.
EMT chiming in. I was paged to a murder-suicide, where the guy strangled his wife, realized what he did, then gave himself a successful 12 gauge haircut. Took off the left side of his head, and the right hemisphere of his brain was laying on his left shoulder.
“Yup. He’s dead.”
Okay, gross as that is, the mental image is HILARIOUS.
My boyfriend books shows, sometimes larger acts and sometimes little punk gigs. I told him last night that we need a band named Intestinal Druid. If only I had a picture of the Shithenge for the album art.
Ooooh I remember reducing someones prolapsed rectum on Christmas day. I sprinkled sugar on it to help the tissues shrink. “While visions of sugar bums danced in her head” was all I could think.
I worked through a Norwalk outbreak. Ive seen c.dificile, and exploded ostomy bags. But never on Christmas day.
I suppose you could always make your own, but then it loses the spontaneity.
My sister’s a nurse. She told me once about a patient she had. I can’t for the life of me remember what condition he had, but his flesh was as thin and fragile as paper. And he had a seizure. She and another nurse had to hold him down, and her fingers sank right into his bicep until she was touching bone.
I’ve had more than one nurse tell me that most nurses have one particular body effluvia that freaks them out. Or they can deal with everything except problems with patient’s eyes or a similar exclusion. Not saying they won’t step up and do what has to be done, but everyone has something that makes them do the gross-out dance. I recall one friend saying that she’s had diarrhea splashed in her face and it didn’t gross her out as much as the time a patient hocked a loogie in her hair.
There is a great nurses’ ghost stories thread on that forum as well, 174 (!) pages of fun reading. Much less vomit inducing than this thread. 
In retrospect, I -think- it was a combination of tube feeding not agreeing with the patient and C diff. All I knew was I walked in the room to check on the patient, noticed a smell, and then noticed …liquid…dripping from one of the corners at the foot of the bed…
I peeled the top sheet off and found the patient almost floating in two inches deep of liquid feces that completely filled the bed from head to toe. She was a very petite very senile little old lady and where that all came from inside her I have no idea whatsoever.
I think the aide and I went through a whole linen cart of towels and bath blankets cleaning the mess up. It might have been easier to roll the whole bed with patient down to the parking lot and hose it down, if it hadn’t been December in St. Louis and smack-dab in a not-very-nice neighborhood.
Gah. I can almost remember the smell just writing about it.
This is very true. And for most of us it is lugies/sputum. One of my friends is doing training to be an ICU nurse, and she HATES suctioning. She actually gags and retches all the time when she does it. I wonder what she will be like in an ICU.
For me it is when wound drainage is grey. I can hand blood, piss, shit, boogers, earwax, Im a little queasy with mouth things but can handle it. But when wounds have grey drainage Im busy swallowing my own vomit. The most recent incident I will hide in a spoiler box especailly for squeamish men. DO NOT click if you are squeamish.
I have worked here for 5 years. The only time I ever tossed my cookies was when one patient had a phimosis that was badly infected, I ended up cleaning around in there and was pulling wads of grey, mucousy-chunky charcoal grey “stuff” out of there. Lots and lots of this. I was wearing a mask because the smell was horrid, and as soon as I was done I went to vomit. A new grad laughed at me, but she didn’t smell the dickrot.
I can confirm that a fair number of medical professionals - in my experience - have trouble dealing with anything related to eyes. I work in ophthalmology (IANAD/N), and am also on the Institutional Review Board for human subjects research at my medical center, so I deal with a lot of people from other departments too. When I’ve had to discuss things like injections into the eyeball, you’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) at how many doctors/nurses, even in fields like oncology, get really uncomfortable at that kind of talk.
Absolutely. I can play in poop, pee, and puke all day, but keep the nasty respiratory secretions AWAY FROM ME. Gag!!!
Yeah, eyes gross me out the most out of anything I could possibly imagine.
Not a nurse, but I can handle watching medical stuff on TV and whatnot – like real surgeries and stuff – without much of a problem.
Except for eyes. I can’t watch eye surgery stuff. I only hope I never have to have it because if they don’t knock me clear out, they’re not getting near me. No way.
I used to be way squeamish about eyes too. Not long after I started in ophthalmology, I saw something that would probably make a lot of people scream, but it actually made me much less squeamish, just because it showed me how eyes aren’t quite as fragile as I’d assumed.
Not kidding, icky stuff:
One of the ophthalmologists was doing an injection with an experimental injector and drug. The bore of the needle on the injector was pretty big and not so sharp, and the doctor had to really push, from a few angles, before she got it to puncture the white of the eye. My thought process was something like, “Ew, OMG… wait. Wow. Eyes are pretty tough!”
You can start bragging once you watch that stuff on Smell-O-Vision. 
Well, yeah, the only surgeries I’ve been involved in were when I was the patient, so I was pretty much not smelling what was going on.