Stories to make a grown man cry. Not for the faint of heart

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Oh thank Og for this thread…

I could tell you about the sweet old man that brought up about 200cc of vomit a couple weeks ago. Not normal vomit, mind, but basically blood mixed with mucus. We gave him the kidney basin, and then realized, no, that wasn’t enough room.

(And keep in mind, I’m a phleb, not a nurse…this isn’t even my area, but I work inpatient so I see a lot of stuff.)

But no…a bit of a lighthearted story.

I was called down to the ER to work on a code (cardiac/resp arrest) which is kind of odd, since ER actually has their own phlebs. The man in question was in his mid-40s, and had fallen off a garden wall and had a coronary (not sure which order) - basically, he was unwell anyway, and this was the coup de grace.

First, it was my foot which stopped his wife as she tried to come into the room with his bag of meds while they were still trying to resuciatate him. Resusciation is ugly; every time I watch hospital on TV I wonder why they’re not pressing hard enough on the chest. I’ve heard most people that get CPR end up with several broken ribs, but I have no cites.

So, we took the bag, and the doc and the other ER people kept working.

Finally, it becomes apparent that this man is beyond human hope. There is nothing that can be done.

So the head doc in the room (and keep in mind there are lots of people - the doc, a couple of younger docs, a few ER nurses, a couple of techs, and me) leans over toward the unfortunate man and says,

“MR. SO-AND-SO!!! DO NOT GO TOWARD THE LIGHT!! GO AWAY FROM THE LIGHT!”

I guess he figured it couldn’t hurt.

Well, Mr. So-and-So died, and they sewed up his head wound nicely before they let his wife in, and he was only the second person I watched die.

(Though, Og help me, the worst thing was watching a friend after her little daughter died of complications of Tetraology of Fallot. At my hospital, no less. Urg.)

22

What a horrid story. I hope someone read her son the riot act.

23

There’s a special place in Hell for people like that…

24

That’s not mild. That’s the most awful story in this thread so far…

25

I find myself really hoping that his children followed his example when it came his time.

26

As the mom of a former 620 gram micropreemie *, let me just take this opportunity where all you Medical Dopers are gathered to say THANK YOU! Y’all are awesome and what you do really, really matters.

And picunurse, I also thought the “They feel funny and they try to die when you give them a bath.” was hilarious. So true. Little buggers.

But I’m on the waiting list for nursing school to become a NICU nurse anyway. :smiley:

*[monty python voice] She got better! [/mpv]

But still not real fond of baths.

27

I would have thought this was the saddest thing in this thread so far.

Of course I have too many bad memories from my childhood to be a good son now.

28

Anyhoo, on to todays medical story:

How many saw the movie Aristocrats, show of hands please; I thought it was not bad, but not great, too many of the routines were just purient, and not inspired. However as I sat in the theare, trying to make up my own version of The Joke, I realised I didn’t have to, I could just tell the truth.

Pt from our local hospital for the criminally insane comes in with a foreign body lodged in the rectum. In this case an apple. Upon closer inspection, such as I’d been hoping to avoid, I identified it as a Golden Delicious.

Now because of the risk of trauma, and we were just plain busy, our local lady surgeon did the honors, with me assisting, rather than one of the ER docs. As I say we were busy; so much so that instead of placing the pt in a room with a door, he was behind curtain #3. So, tan jumpsuit, shackles, Sx(surgeon) says “please get on the gurney on your hands and knees.” Pt “well, I’ve been in this position before.” Sx “I’m sorry to hear that.” We proceed to try all the tools, techniques and approaches we can think of in the ER, without success. That is, not in getting the apple out. Liquid stool is another matter, and plenty of that is coming out, and although it smells bad, we professionals are used to worse. Try a little suction, a little retraction, multiple instruments to no avail. Eventually I go and fetch a pair of forcepts from OB. Now these are essentially a glorified pair of salad tongs, jumbo sized and chrome plated that they use to pull a stuck baby out. Our pt, as it turns out is not quite able to take a full sized forcept up the butt, so we separate them into halfs and the doc uses 1 half sort of like an ice cream scoop and gets the apple out in pieces. Her and I were friends ever after.

29

Yanno - I’ve never been able to definitively seperate Golden Delicious from Grannysmith without tasting. Did you grow up on an apple orchard (I hope)?

30

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
As the mom of a former 620 gram micropreemie *, let me just take this opportunity where all you Medical Dopers are gathered to say THANK YOU! Y’all are awesome and what you do really, really matters.

And picunurse, I also thought the “They feel funny and they try to die when you give them a bath.” was hilarious. So true. Little buggers.

But I’m on the waiting list for nursing school to become a NICU nurse anyway. :smiley:
microdot
baked potato
toasterhead
circulating blood volume is equal to 3 of those little plastic medicine cups.

And yes, we have the best job on the world

31

I have two that come to mind pretty quickly - one that still irritates me , and one that’s just gross.

I was on my surgery rotation as a third year student (which is as close as I want to get to Hell on earth), making rounds. We were reviewing the chart of a man that had come in with intestinal blockage who also happened to be HIV-positive. Two of the four residents were relatively quiet, but the other two were having a grand old time making disparaging comments about his sexual orientation and his medical condition.

We walked into the room, and it turns out that I knew both the patient and his partner (I didn’t recognize him just from the name, not to mention being distracted and irritated over the residents’ rudeness). We greeted each other by name, I talked with them a bit … and found it interesting that there were no further rude comments made in my presence afterwards.

The second one was on my rotation in jail. I was receiving report about a patient who had been taken to the hospital over the weekend for swelling in her upper lip. It had been diagnosed as angioedema (essentially allergic swelling) and she had been sent back to custody.

As we walk onto the medical ward, the female deputy says - “what’s that smell?” We walk to this woman’s medical ward - it gets worse. We walk up to her bed, the smell getting stronger and stronger. I almost lost breakfast when she started talking to us.

It turned out that she had cut her upper lip somehow and had developed an anerobic infection in her lip - which tracked up into her cheek. I went and retrieved the attending, who injected a local and made a small incision. The image of truly awe-inspiring amounts of pus running down her throat still gives me shivers - not to mention that I can pretty much diagnose an anerobic infection by smell after all these years.

32

OK, my gross story of the day. I may have posted this before.

I was doing a surgery rotation when we were called to the ER for rectal bleeding. My intern sent me down for the initial history and physical exam.

This was a young man who had a history of chronic prostatitis. He had been on chronic antibiotic therapy, but still had insipated secretions that didn’t clear. Apparently, his urologist recommended self massage. Of the prostate.

He, obviously, was comfortable with his body and it helped him for a while. But the thumb to the prostate stopped “cutting the mustard” after a few months. So he rigged something up – a metal rod covered by a rubber glove. That worked a lot better, until one evening when he got a little carried away and felt something rip.

We saw him at 1 AM. Bright red blood per rectum. The surgeon gave me instructions – “let’s try to tamponade it.” Makes sense, you have a cut anywhere else, direct pressure is the first thing to try. We initially discussed having me apply direct pressure with a piece of gauze and my fingers. I was less than relishing this thought, for obvious reasons. After a few minutes of two fingers in the guy’s rectum, we gave it up. So instead we used a jumbo roll of Kerlix. Opened it up, squeezed about half a tube of KY onto it, and then fed all 4.1 yards into the guy’s butt.

He wasn’t too happy but it was better than my two fingers. We left him in the ER for an hour, took care of some stuff, and returned at 2:30 AM or so. Med student’s job was obviously to remove the Kerlix. Found the end and started pulling, all 12 feet of KY, blood, and shit-soaked Kerlix. Back in with 2 fingers and some gauze – still had bright red blood. The tamponade strategy had failed – time to take the guy to surgery.

We consented him and reserved an OR. We phoned a urology consult, obviously due to the history of prostatitis as well as the possibility that a rectal tear can tear through the prostate and involve the prostatic urethra, causing a rectourethral fistula. That would be bad news. Anyway, we wheel the guy upstairs, ansethesiology knocks him out and we position him for anoscopy butt facing up, face down. Urology arrives in the OR for cystogram to check the urethra. Despite the fact that the patient is face down, the urologist takes one look at the guy and knows his name. He states that he is well known to urology – he shows up in clinic nearly every week, sticks 5 fingers into his own rectum and points to where it hurts.

Anyway, he didn’t have a full thickness tear and was discharged after surgery the next morning.

I feel sorry for the guy, I mean it must have been terribly painful. But I suppose the moral of the story is if you are going to goatse, do it without involvement of metal implements.

33

This one’s for all the interns and residents. A cautionary tale to prove that a good nurse can be your best friend… or your worst enemy. It’s always your choice.
Through the years I’ve worked side by side with many remarkable doctors. Some are ledgendary, some are infamous.
This is about one of the infamous ones.
He was an anesthesia resident, hoping to someday become an intensivist for PICU. The man could not keep a single thought to himself. Every idea that came into his head fell out his mouth. Many of them were not just wrong, but absurd. He was worst in tense situations. He would call for labs every minute or so. Never a string of them, but one at a time. It seemed like his goal was to exsangunate the baby. Even the attending made fun of him behind his back.
I hate that. I’m a very direct individual. I don’t laugh at folks then smile in their faces.
One night, I had a 4 year old with acute pericarditis. We’d put a pericardial drain in the night before, on admission.
The attending who put it in said, at the time, it would likely clot within 24 hours and he’d have to go to surgery for a window.
The boy’s vital signs were trending toward paracardial tamponade when I called the resident on call. :smack: when* he* came in, I told him what was happening. He said I should Flush the line with 5 ccs of sterile saline. :eek: I said, unequivocally NO! (that would put more pressure on the heart, and likely cause EMD/cardiac arrest)
He said he was the doctor, and my only job was to follow his orders.
I said “Look, I’ve been doing this job longer than you’ve been alive. You don’t know what you’re doing in this case. Go call your attending!”
He blanched white, obviously afraid he might be wrong. He said “That doesn’t mean you’re right!”
Instead of doing what was right for the patient, he dug heels in. He said he’d just flush the line himself.
I stood between him and the child, picked up the phone on the wall and dialed the attending’s home #.
Of course, the attending’s response to the story was , “He wants to WHAT!? Stop him any way you can until I get there.”
When I told the resident what the attending had said, he started to cry. He said I had ruined his career. :dubious: Rather than add insult, I just said he should go to the doctor’s lounge and pull himself together.
The attending arrived, we sent the kid to OR for a pericardial window, and all was well.
Except, the resident was never seen in PICU again.
I didn’t then and don’t now believe I ruined his career. If it was ruined, he did it to himself. He stayed in medicine, just not in PICU. He became an anesthesiologist.

34

yes, anerobic infections are truly, eye wateringly, hard to breathe bad, every done an impacted bartholin gland? bwahahaha

35

Just how dumb does a doctor have to be to say that kind of thing to a nurse? I know it happens, but Og, I always thought it was an expression of stupidity. It’s about as rock dumb as having a butter-bar telling his/her leading NCO that s/he doesn’t need any advice.

I’m of the opinion that the more of these egos you and fellow nurses can remove from the profession of medicine the better the profession would be.

36

Thank Og I’m in psychiatry now. If I even *think * anything smells funny I call the hospitalist :smiley:

As for nurses taking down an "MD: (read as “minor deity”) a peg or two - I’m all for it. Glad I figured out a long time ago that nurses are your friends and colleagues if you’re nice to them :slight_smile:

37

When my younger brother had cancer, he was housed in the children’s ward of the local hospital. Sometimes when my mom was busy I’d drive down there and stay with him. It was hard to be there sometimes because, how do you make small talk with the other family members/friends? It’s just to sad to even think about now.

38

Og help us.

39

This is a normal occurance in nursing home. Some don’t even get calls or cards. Horrible

40

Heh, I used to work in pediatric cardiology, so I understood this post quite well, as well as the attitude of the CT surgeon. An old boss of mine (not a surgeon, they weren’t part of our department) talked about how early on in his training, he learned that you make friends with, respect, and be nice to the nurses, or else they can make your life hell. He often said that nurses and support staff were what really made hospitals run, and a hospital with only them would run a lot longer than one with only doctors and administrators. He was a great boss. :smiley: