I totally win the thread after today. Sorry, but I do.
I’m going to spoiler this one. It’s gross. Please, before you click, remember that this is me, Queen of Doper TMI saying it’s too gross to leave unspoilered. And remember, I’m a home health nurse.
Wound care. Been seeing this patient for about three weeks. His legs are gross - multiple infected ulcers, nice and green and yellow and oozing foul smelly oozy stuff. Today, as I’m on the phone with the woman from the wound care clinic where I’m sending him for a consultation, and she’s telling me the transportation she promised isn’t panning out and she may have to reschedule him yet again, I’m unwrapping the wound dressing with my other hand and…
[spoiler]
Maggots start dropping to the floor. About a dozen of them. And I realize that I have to keep unwrapping, and there are going to be more maggots. Sure enough, one of his ulcers has been infested with maggots. Not nice clean surgical maggots. Fresh from the field volunteer maggots. And there are dozens. Maybe more than 100, all wriggling and dropping off and crawling around and climbing the walls of the basin I have his foot in and dropping off the other side and I don’t even have any tweezers with me, so I grab a couple of cotton tipped swabs and I’m using them like chopsticks to pick maggots up off the carpet and toss them back into the basin and it’s like Whack-a-Mole only with maggots. Whack-A-Maggot. And they’re crawling toward me and I’m picking them up and flinging them back and he says, “It’s really itchy today. Why is it itchy?” :smack:
You know what they don’t teach in nursing school? They don’t teach you how to clean a wound and re-wrap it while chasing maggots around the floor with chopsticks.
Silver lining: the wound bed, once I got most of the maggots off, has never looked better. Nice beefy red granulation tissue; all the dead eschar and infected slough is gone. [/spoiler]
Yeah. I held it together and appeared nice and professional while it was happening. As soon as I got to the car I started dry heaving and I called my mommy.
I thought surgical maggots are used because they consume dead tissue, promoting healing of the living tissue. Grossness of unexpected maggotry aside* didn’t they help in the end?
I had no idea I’d ever type out that phrase in my life.
Y’know, I’m not sure. Wouldn’t it be funny if he got to the wound care clinic tomorrow (she found him transportation after all; the panic in my voice may have helped) and they removed all his free range maggots and replaced them with sterile lab raised maggots?
They sure *looked *like they helped. And, y’know, yes, it was the unexpected maggotry that made it such a horrid experience. If I go back on Friday and the wound clinic has said, “Y’know, the maggots are helping, so we’re going to leave some in and here’s how you care for the wound with maggot therapy,” I think I’ll actually be okay with it. Unexpected maggotry, on the other hand…vomit
I’m glad your patient’s wound looked better, my heart went out to him before I opened the spoiler.
Dr. Girlfriend, you’ve had that job long enough that it won’t look bad on your resume. Good luck with your job search.
Yllaria thank you so much for the reminders. People really do die from the heat every year because they forget to take simple precautions.
My minion and I went out yesterday. We took a table, because I am not reboxing 1200 boxes on the floor. My boss thought I was a genius for thinking about that. :smack:
There is an ice machine in a different building, so I asked if we could fill our ice chest on the way out. This caused multiple phone calls to get permission and we didn’t leave until 9. Yes, we got the ice to keep our water cold, but dang. I hate the politics that caused the delay. Its just ice, from a machine that runs all the time. It wasn’t like we were asking them to pay for our bottles of water or anything.
I’ve checked with risk management and she (a 1 person department) agrees that we shouldn’t work there in the afternoon. Then she scolded me because I should have gone through my boss. So, I called my boss and she agreed that I should have had her do it, but understood that I wasn’t trying to go behind her (boss’s) back and was just trying to help her get everything set up in advance.
Waay back when I was grooming dogs, I got an Old English Sheepdog in to be shaved down for the summer. Looking at their card, this was apparently the only grooming this dog ever got as when he came in the shop he was a filthy matted smelly mess. So, I put him up on the table and started shaving, until the clippers jammed. Pulled them out and yup, there was half a maggot stuck in the teeth.
The best/worst part? They said this dog slept on their daughters bed…
The problem with free range maggots is essentially the same as with taking in an abandoned cat, dog, or adopting the nest of field mice you found. You get all of the baggage that goes with them. Starting with staph infections and ending with some really nasty stuff.
Medical grade have been raised in nice sterile pens and fed nothing but kobe beef and chardonnay.
I know, I know. Who serves beef with white wine. I never said they were civilized.
Apparently we’re no longer allowed to have tissues at our desks because of infomation security and customer privacy issues. At least managment thinks it’s completely idiotic and is fighting with the auditors.
Wait, what? How does even a crazy person put this thought together? I honestly can’t imagine. Are they worried you’ll, I dunno, use tissues to hide using sign language to discuss customer info amongst yourselves? Or write on the tissues? Do they not want you to use tissues at all, and if so, how exactly does that work, and if not, how is having them not on your desk but somewhere else make anything more secure?
<- not enough of these guys in all the whole internets for the strength of my “whuh?”
I’ve been through this so I can tell you the process they probably went through to arrive at this rule.
IS requires that no customer information or corporate documentation be left on peoples desks.
How do we police this? People could cover things up with coffee cups or hide information behind picture frames. We must make it easy to see that their desks are completely clear.
Rule comes out saying NOTHING is allowed on the desk and includes tissue boxes.
So basically it’s not that the tissues are a threat to information security it’s that their existance makes the job of policing that more difficult. The fact that your work life is made more difficult never comes into the discussion.
Let your boss fight the battle and wait 3 months until the regulations fade in peoples memory. Things will be back to normal by then if history is any measure.
Now now, they thought ahead far enough to consider the extra effort stuff on the desk would cause them, lets not raise our expectations too high.
Okay fine, when it happened at our company the rule was the drawers must be locked if you were not sitting at your desk. In the beginning they went so far as to check if you got up to pick up your job from the printer. That did not last long.
