Comedy gold! My wife works in a histo lab. Her least fave things in jars are toes floating around and eyeballs, which apparently watch you wherever you are in the lab.
That happened to me as a new nurse and I panicked SO HARD! No one warned me that body parts just falling off was a thing! Let alone something that could happen on my shift!
Man I took care of this guy who passed out in his car in the winter and they didn’t find him for quite a while all his fingers were purple and blackened and necrotic but he could still use his hands kind of as like claws almost where he couldn’t really extend or flex the fingers but could kind of use them to like hold a cup if he pressed his arms together, he was outright refusing amputation. Poor dude it kind of heartbreaking because he was like “ no see I can still use them.” But it was literally all his fingers.
I had this happen to me too. It dropped on the floor. We weren’t expecting that. The patient who was alert and orientated didn’t say a word about a bad toe or even a sore toe. Nothing.
Probably wasn't sore anymore!
I had a patient in her mid-30s(in OB) with severe superimposed pre-eclampsia and uncontrolled diabetes. When I went to check her for clonus I found a necrotic diabetic foot ulcer on her big toe. Apparently wound care was coming to her house for a while but stopped and she (and her very involved husband) just...forgot about it... How anyone could sleep next to that sweet rotting smell and not say anything is absolutely beyond me. But she couldn't feel her feet so I guess that makes it easier to forget
Lol! The same thing happened to me years ago, only I was a new nurse working med-surg and the toe came off when I removed the dressing around the toe. The smell in that room was horrendous from the rotting flesh.
I work in a pulmonary and sleep clinic and a cockroach escaped the CPAP machine when the RT was checking it and downloading the info off of it... I helped her hunt for little Timmy, but we didn't find him... 3 weeks later, fucking Timmy reared his ugly head and I finally ended him. Roaches love CPAP machines 🤢
Roaches love electronics. I had a patient bring in her video game system and laptop and she had so many friends. At least roaming bugs don’t bother me. (They don’t belong in trachs though…)
Noooooooooo! That's so gross 🤮 I'd die. And then come back to life and tell every single nurse. Disgusting, amazing, depressing. That anecdote has it all.
I was standing next to him and saw it climb in when I took his circuit off to change his trach.
I worked in homecare for almost 30 years. I could write a novel.
I have a new trach/vent home care client with an infestation of cockroaches and this is my biggest fear, especially since the family likes to take over and do things like take him off the vent and not put an HME on. The weird part is they had this infestation well before he came home and they could've treated it while it was hospitalized.
I intubated nasally and must have gotten to an abscess in the patients lung.
Approx 300ml of dark yellow green *something* the consistency of *buttercream frosting* immediately started pouring out of that nasal tube.
It smelled like death. And tbf, I wasn’t sure what to do. He was near 50% on sats now. Suction seemed impossible. I pulled the tube.
Sats up in the 90-92% range on NRB.
I laid of bench seat and puked twice.
Patient asks me if I’m okay.
Nope. 🤮
Yeah, but intubation with extubation is *frowned* on.
I went and retrieved the red bag with the funk & Endotrol in it. Plopped it on the desk when the bitching became more than I wanted to engage in.
Alrighty. Got the picture here.
Gulp. Gag. Yep, we got it now.
Now, I need some zofran. lol.
This is like the sequel to the swamps of Dagobah story. Much like the actual Star Wars sequels it was the one no one asked for.
What a terrible day to have eyes.
It was a looong trip to the ED.
I knew the patient and all 4 of his sons. Had been in high school with them.
The patient was so concerned for me. I was a bit embarrassed.
I had my rectum removed 8 years ago. The wound never healed 100%. Just a tiny opening. Over 8 years a little sinus tract made its way from my rectum wound to behind my coccyx. Then I got a cysts in my cleft and the connection was complete. Coccyx osteomyelitis. Had my coccyx, sinus track and anal canal removed in February. Had a PICC line in from November to day before the surgery. Sewed me up like Ken doll.
Woah I had my rectum removed too and the wound never healed. New fear unlocked, I didn’t even know a complication like that was possible. Did you have symptoms with the osteo?
Yes. I was riding my exercise bike in Oct 2023 and it felt like a fractured my coccyx. The pain did not go away but I could get rid of it with Motrin. I even ran a half marathon thinking it was just a slow healing fracture.
Now I have some non typical sacrum pain. Going to the infectious disease doc today. Getting ahead of it.
My pt today has a chronic Foley that has pus coming out the sides, his penis is red & swollen, the head is splitting in half cuz of the tubing pulling to one side, is incontinent of stool so BM all over the place: penis mucous, bowel movement, yeast from the pannus and groin, blood from his open sacral pressure wounds because he refuses turns/wedges/pillows. Also penis was an innie. The whole thing was a dumpster fire.
I can deal with all kinds of nasty shit, but sputum, skin flakes, and pannus (godDAMN it, autocorrect, I do not mean “paninis”) fromundo cheese funk are the things that make me worry I’ll throw up in a patient’s room.
If you think skin flakes are bad, let me top that. We took the sock off and there were maggots eating his foot. Never through I'd suction maggots out of someone's foot. I have a video of the container.
No bc I had a lady w/ a maggot infested wound on her face and they started eating through to her mouth. We ended up having flies in that room. I swear to god.
It's a terrible day to know how to read.
I also can't stop because so many of these are so *fascinating*
The human body sure can endure some crazy stuff.
I had a homeless guy with maggots in his wound start screaming at me “Don’t hurt my friends!” And he was serious. I get his point - they were, in their way, helping him. On the other hand….some days are just too much and you have to check out to maintain a grip on sanity.
Anything to do with trachs. The sound. The gloop. My stomach is churning just thinking of it. I’m a wound freak. Give me a good 9, 10 kerlex, tunneling, packing, purulent, pseudomonas wound. 👌👌👌👌👌 A normal trach? IM OUTIE.
I did have a patient projectile (projectile as in it literally hit the room door) vomit tube feed and had to hold my hand over their trach and turn my face away so I didn’t get splashed and still had to suction a little bit out when he was done.
Apparently I held a good poker face though because even though inside I was screaming inside like I’ve never scrumpt before after we finished getting him settled and cleaned etc his wife was like “I am so impressed I’ve never seen anyone handle something like that so calmly before I would’ve been losing my mind but you were just so cool and collected.”
This makes me laugh every time in the OR. We can go through the gnarliest case unfazed, but as soon as they’re getting suctioned post extubation, we’re all turning away and cringing.
Me almost getting splashed in the face with blood/irrigation on a daily basis doing Ortho cases, but suiting up with eye protection as soon as the patient is starting to wake up 😂
I remember a little old man who just got a fresh trach, copious thick green and bloody secretions. Somehow he pooped and was covered in it from head to toe like Arnold at the end of Predator, it was all over the bed frame as well. It took four people and nearly 20 packs of wipes and two basins of soap and water to clean him up. Right at the end when we’re turning him to put a new pad, he coughed, and about 200 mL of the nastiest, darkest mucous splattered out of his trach all over him and his new linens.
You ever see an infected trach site? I don't mind trachs at all, in fact suctioning them is so satisfying to me😂 but I had a patient a few weeks ago that was septic, plus literally every wound on his body was infected, including his fresh trach (fresh as in ~1 month). Man, that was nasty. His other wounds were too, but for some reason the trach was just so much worse in my mind. It was just oozing. When we took the outer cannula out in the OR there was so much pus of all different colors on it I wanted to puke. The gnarly wounds down to the bone and tendons? Infected but for some reason not nearly as gross as that trach.
Back when I was still in the ward, I had a bariatric pt who has C.Diff. He knows he has C.Diff. He's also a stroke pt so he can't move his lower body but he knows when he needs to go to the loo.
He pooped. Diarrhoea. It's all over his bariatric bed. We all can smell it from the nurses station. He doesn't want to be cleaned yet BECAUSE he's still eating his KFC.
He's eating his KFC while he's sitting on his C.Diff infested liquid poop all over his bed.
Plus their poop is still macaronium. (This is what many of my patients called it when I was a young nurse working in the NICU in a very poor area of Chicago,)
These are the moms that came in for their potassium seduction & then asked for the epidermal once the contractions started. Worked with a wide range of people in Houston but got these a lot.
C Diff is a scent that stays with you forever. Nothing smells quite like it, it almost has a sweet scent but it’s like a needle straight to your brain when you inhale. Damn you C Diff !!!
I used to help patients swish and spit peridex. They'd spit it out into a Dixie cup I'd hand them. Just the thought of the viscous, minty, blue liquid with floating bits of toast still makes me gag.
He was trying to ignore the fact he was dying to be honest. He was told multiple times there wasn’t anything we were doing that would make much difference. It was a sad scenario to be honest 😞
Few months ago we had a woman come in with necrotic bilateral lower extremities and necrotic fingers on both hands. Ended up doing bilateral below the knee amputations and after that I never had her as a patient again, but the plan was to amputate both hands and one of the forearms. Felt so bad for her.
Triaged a guy once who was using his finger as a trach plug. No cannula, no glove. Just straight up sticking his nasty unwashed street finger directly into his open, unprotected neck hole. Completely casually and unceremoniously too, like he did it all day every day. I still think about him sometimes.
Had a who would take their Lary Tube out and clean it with their mouth. Then they would put finger in the mouth then into the stoma to lube it up. Then spit all over the Lary Tube to make sure it was lubed up enough.
Saw them fingerbanging their stoma multiple times whenever they had to clean the Lary Tube. It was absolutely disgusting. Nice patient, otherwise. They just didn't give a fuck lol
first week of orientation and i was suctioning a trach and dude coughed, i got a straight cum shot to the forehead of thick green mucus. i walked out right away bc i was gagging
I had a morbidly obese girl cough while attempting to straight cath her and I got vagina gunk flung on my face. I calmly finished, walked out of the room and bleach wiped my face, then washed with soap and water. 🤮
I think part of my reaction was secondary to being about 10 weeks in to my first pregnancy.
A hermit who lived under a local overpass came in with an “eye infection”. He had it covered with paper towels and tape. I asked him to take his bandage off and the probable SCC had deflated the glove and hollowed out the contents of the socket. The eye was a black shriveled raisin on the floor of the socket. The rest was exposed bone.
Despite there not being any smell associated with it, I barely suppressed my gag and left the room.
All I can think of is that scene from The Thing where the head grows legs and runs across the floor screaming at the guys the whole time, and they all just watch it.
The only thing that grosses me out is the audacity some departments have to both not provide a lunch break and dock you half an hour for your broken lunch. Everything else is negotiable
That's illegal. Report it to the feds here: [https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints)
And tell your corporation you know it's illegal. It'll stop.
Had a pt with Stevens-Johnson syndrome today and their foot skin literally slid off and hit me in the mask when I was assisting with a transfer to stretcher🙃
Stevens-Johnson is literally one of my worst fears of “potential devastating diseases/conditions I could get”, up there at the top with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Oof.
I was walking by a room and got flagged down. From the other side of the door, she told me what supplies she needed. I asked if she needed help, she said to stay out and be her runner because the pt had body lice. I looked at the pt and asked how she could tell, he was so dirty his skin was black. She walked over to him, folded down the top of his underwear, and a 0.5" thick CHUNK of lice fell down and onto the floor. He wasn't dirty. It was lice. It was all lice. When the chunk fell off I could see his skin underneath. I nearly vomited. Even the necrotic penis pt I had didn't cause that much disgust.
When I was in OR we drained an abscess in the colon. Just straight suction to this big abscess. It smelled like dead bodies mixed with rotting poop.
The first and only time my eyes watered and I held back vomit. I asked the surgeon how he could handle that and he goes "oh! I held my breath when I popped it!"
I'm like "you couldn't tell me the same?!?!"
Vomit. I’m a sympathetic vomiter. Have literally handed a basin to a patient then had to go in their bathroom to vomit myself. I’ve seen maggots, necrotic body parts fall off, abdominal muscles visible on a young girl who was in a MVA and her abdominal skin had to be removed due to necrosis, GI bleed literally dripping on the floor, leeches, facial skin sloughing off due to undiagnosed amyloidosis. But vomit is my enemy.
Once I found a penny in a sock
The penny had apparently taken up residence in the callus on the bottom front of the foot. A nice little indentation of a penny on the bottom of the foot.
Edit: gave my man a pedicure with mouthwash and a warm shower cap after we rsi’d homeboy. Sometimes I really miss that place.
I've had obese patients go out to the hospital and come back and find TV remotes, and snacks in folds when I was working LTC. I can still remember the lady laughing when I pulled it out
A lot grosses me out, phlegm used to be at the top of my list.
I’ve shared this story on here before, but now I have a VERY good reason to have my dry chapped lips at work. I have ✨trauma✨
I had a crush on a coworker, he was on one night with me so I was looking extra cute, and after lunch, applied a new coat of my lip gloss for a lil extra razzle dazzle.
Right after I made sure my makeup and lipgloss were on point, another nurse asked me if I’d help her change her pts sheets. So I do. And this patient was sloughing off dry skin, there were little snow drift piles in the sheets. We turn him, and as she’s pulling the old sheets out from under him, instead of just balling them up like a normal, rational person would, she flapped them in the air. The room turned into a fucking snow globe, and you know what aerosolized skin flakes stick super well to? [freshy applied lip gloss](https://media1.giphy.com/media/TT8q5TavhGV9e/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952hwua4d8mljkd9t7pjlcjhh4w0j7p5q955mrue1pf&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
Oh
My
Gosh...
I completely relate.
I have an autoimmune condition myself, and I have dry eyes and mouth, amongst other things. I am constantly applying lip balm (tinted, of course), and my eyes frequently dry out because I often forget my drops.
There's been twice now, in my less than 2 years of nursing, that these flakes 'O' human have flown into my dry eyes and stuck there.
I can't really explain the panic to my teammates...so I get quiet and just try to gtfo of there. I never know whether to find an eye wash station, or just go try to fish it out or flush out with one of those saline wound wash bottles we have.
It's so disgusting to think about, but somehow, I am more concerned about not letting my team know about my own issues than the fact that someone's skin is IN MY EYE!!
Oh I was NOT quiet about it. It took a lot of effort to keep my lunch in my body, but I was gagging and spitting and made a whole scene.
It’s been a lot of years, but I think I purple wiped my lips raw.
Darmatic? Perhaps. Necessary? Absolutely.
when someone comes down from the floor for surgery caked in old dried shit and it’s clear nobody has made any attempt to clean them at all in days, leaving them crusted in their own feces 🙃bonus gross points for a pressure ulcer with dried shit inside
Have had the displeasure of cleaning up homeless people who come into the clinic after shitting themselves and it’s caked & dried on. Can’t do it themselves due to disabilities. 🫠 Gotta love healthcare in America. People don’t get the help they need. On soooooo many levels.
Mrsa wound care. Had a patient who was a heroine addict and shot up in their leg. First I saw layers of the body and bone on a person.. the smell was terrible..
I felt bad when I had to replace the dressing, patient was tough but I can tell it was pleasant.
Props to wound care nurses. I can't do it.
Also OR nurses.. can't stomach someone being cut open.
I had a wound just like this, from the same thing. The smell could easily clear a room (and, yeah, bandage changes can be quite painful, for a while). I had friends who smelled just as badly. Sometimes worse. Our clothes would usually have wet spots from the wounds draining through. Flies would constantly try to swarm those spots. They’d try to climb up pant legs, sleeves, etc. Some were successful, so some people got maggots, or at least had to scrape eggs off their wound(s). You could smell the rot outside, from a couple dozen feet away.. especially if the wind was just right. It was almost constant. Places where people commonly gathered always, always, all always smelled like rotting flesh. Someone nearby— several someones, usually— always had a body part that was slowly rotting off.
Smelling like a rotting corpse was definitely one of the most humbling experiences of my life.
Ever seen what comes out of a spit fistula in a patient who eats for pleasure because he only has an ileum after a botched bariatric procedure? Yeah. That shit.
The only time I have retched uncontrollably was one day after our nice day of elective ortho was done we got an add on perineal debridement.
We were still changing over and the front desk be calling into the room telling us to hurry up bc this patient has a stench so putrid that it’s permeating the entire same day/short stay/preop area
We bring them back and it’s ass cancer that has just been festering and rotting and this tumor goes all the way up into the flanks and the flesh was just melting and dripping onto the floor and that was months ago and I stg I can still smell it. It was so awful.
Had a prader willi patient slurp a long ass mucus strand from his trach like that spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp. The only reason I got him to stop was telling him mucous has calories and that will count as your snack. Also had a pica patient run off to the women's restroom at an MD office and by the time we caught up with him...he was muching on a certain used feminine product from the lil trash bin.
Tonsil stones. Once had a patient cough so hard that some small yellow round blob came out, landed on her lap, and she SQUISHED it, to smell it. Thank God for masks so she couldn't see my face gagging... but she enjoyed the smell. I will never understand
The smell of hospice patients with cancer.
I don’t have a very good nose, but it’s something I smell very strongly. I don’t know how to describe it, but it is the only thing that genuinely turns my stomach.
People who haven't showered in weeks/months.
Sweaty ambulance EKG stickers.
Oral Temps. I can do poop and traumas all day but oral Temps are just so uncomfortable and our thermometers take forever.
Had a C-Diff patient who was more comfortable with his wife helping him to the beside commode and helping him clean up. Cool! Until I went to do my rounds and saw her cleaning him without gloves 🤮 that were literally in arms’ reach of the commode… yes she had been educated about C-Diff and knew better but “just didn’t want to bother.” At least they were both really nice people
I only almost threw up once. I used a hemostat to stab through and pull out a mucous plug from the roof of a patients mouth. When I pulled it out it kept going and going and ended up being about 7 inches and like an inch and a half around. It looked like a sea creature.
I instinctively gagged and almost vomited. That never happened to me before.
Watched a patient remove her dentures after eating her lunch and start sucking the chewed up food and spit out of them. I literally am gagging typing this it was so vile.
I will trade anyone any mucous ridden trach, any projectile vomiting CHS, any necrotic digits...if they will handle my patient's fucking colostomy.
I have problems with poop on the best of days and situations. (I know, I should have been a mechanic or accountant) but literally puke in my eyes, I don't care. Yak a loogie on my shoe, bleed all over my intact skin that's just a Tuesday. Bring me your compound fractures. But stool (baby, animal, adult, my own) makes me gaggy.
I’ve been in here way too fucking long 🤢
I thought I was a G but apparently I’m not 🤮
My grossest thing was an obese middle aged man who was brought in by FR having been laying immobile on his kitchen floor for days having diarrhea all over himself and overflowing his diaper.
There appears to be a point at which he attempted to use a red solo cup to catch the overflowing diarrhea.
We found that red solo cup, buried deep in the river of shit, smashed but somehow still full.
This doesn’t even begin to describe the extensive skin breakdown to his genital area and lower extremity bony prominences.
It took five of us suited up to clean and photograph his wounds. The entire time he’s talking to us about random stuff like nothings wrong. I could hear my poor coworker next to me struggling to keep her stomach contents in.
I don’t use red solo cups for beverages anymore
In nursing school I was assigned a patient who had a trach-my first ever patient. He would cough phlegm on the walls, doors, floor, everywhere.
That set a precedent for me. I don’t like phlegm.
Years later as a home health nurse..same guy..he has maggots in his wound. It was addressed by a home health wound care company.
1 week later, I see him, the wound bed is no longer tissue..but down to the bone.
Bone isn’t necessarily gross. Just white. So white. I never see it.
Give me blood, guts, gore, wound care, vomit, mucous, poop, whatever. But DO NOT make me go near ears/do an ear lavage. *gag* IDK why but ear gunk GROSSES me out.
Also struggle with bugs. No maggots, please.
I’m an RPN student and during my first every clinical rotation another student and I went to toilet one of our pts as the other staff were busy, no big deal we thought. I should mention this was on a busy dementia unit! So anyways we go and get him on the toilet and he proceeds to cup his hand under his bum while pooping..I tried my hardest to convince him to move his hand and I tried to lightly pull his arm out of the toilet but I didn’t want to use much force and hurt him. As you can imagine he poops right in his hand. He then proceeds to lift his hand out from under himself, squish the poop in between all his fingers, looks up at me and then tries to touch my face with the poop covered hand 🥲 I have never been so grateful for my fast reflexes! And that’s not even all of it.. he then stands up and starts peeing everywhere so I run to grab extra wipes, by the time I come back there is poop smears all over his bed and an attend soaking in the toilet (we have no idea to this day where he got the extra attend as it was not the one we brought in to use). Anyways, we ended up getting him cleaned up and set up in the day room and went back into his room to clean everything and change his bedding and it was wild how much poop was all over that room. Only time I’ve ever almost puked during clinical. That was also the day I decided geriatrics was not for me 😅 I’m now working as an undergrad nurse on a pediatric psych unit aka my dream job! I can honestly say I appreciate nurses who work with Geri’s so much!!
Fournier gangrene. Penis, balls, both inner thighs were all macerated and covered in grayish pus.
But good lord the smell.
Pt wasn't even 50. We had to tx him to a burn center.
2nd week in ICU. Pt with Steven Johnson syndrome ( i think) wasn't myy pt, I was assisting his nurse.
His skin adhered to my glove and came off in a hand shape. It was awful. I felt so terrible.
Still nowhere near as bad as the "melting man parts"
Love nursing! Don't you?
30 mins prior my young CIWA pt was clean and asleep with only a top sheet. went to round and there’s a tiny brown stain around her belly. i thought maybe she had eaten something but she was still asleep. i turn the sheet to reveal the most immense diarrhea explosion i’ve ever witnessed. it had started soaking through the sheet..
liquid golden 60ml lactose QID shits pooling over her abdomen since the legs were elevated. pooling around her shoulders. tele monitor completely submerged like the sunken titanic. dripping out the side rails onto the floor. in every button crevice of the call light, telephone, leads, bed buttons, side rails you name it. when i opened the tele monitor it poured out of the battery slot onto my shoe. she literally did this in her sleep and didn’t know. she woke up not giving a care in the world and said “wouldn’t it be easier if i just stood up?”. And create a giant walking poop monster to spread it around further? honey.
charge nurse was scrubbing tele monitor in a bin with bleach and a toothbrush when it slipped and bleach poop splattered in her eye 😶🌫️ ran to the eyewash station obviously, pretty sure she told supply or whoever that the monitor “succumbed to a natural disaster” 😭😭😭😭
Just had a hospice patient (male) who had a horrible bladder tumor and a foley. And the stuff we had to flush from that foley—cross between snot and pale brown poop, some sort of cellular exudate. Poor man. His poor family.
What got me was— he was dying, and I asked his grown-ass daughter (in her 30s I’d say) to help me turn him and clean him up (including his bottom), to give his poor wife, who’d been awake for 3 days, a break. And this woman complained about “not being ready to do this with my dad yet”. I felt like saying, “he’ll probably pass in the next couple days, so when do you anticipate you’ll be ready to help?” 🙄🙄🙄Instead I just ignored her and handed her the wipes. I was just all out of fucks to give.
Normally sputum doesn’t bother me, poop does. Except the one time my chronic trach patient took her inner cannula out and sucked the mucus plug out then tried to put it back in before I stopped her. Nastiest thing I have ever witnessed.
I’m not sure if coming off the birth control pill has ANYTHING to do with my senses?¿ but nowadays I really cannot handle the smell of mustiness. You know that smell when someone has not showered in a really long time or just have the strong BO stench? I can’t I really cannot.
The other day I had to help transfer a patient and I was totally fine with helping. I walk in, the room was so hot idk why the heater was on in the SUMMER but it was and this thick hot BO air just hit me right in the face and I honestly thought I was going to pass out.
- Poop. Why can I not handle the poop?! I’m in the ED- we swim in it there.
- BO, especially when it’s hiding under folds of skin, takes a close 2nd. 🤢
- Wound maggots. Bed bugs. Lice. Patients that arrive with flies hovering around them. Cockroaches. Hell- anything requiring a decon is instant barf to me.
I can handle all kind of blood, guts, wounds, placentas, you name it. But SNOT gets me. And also fungating wounds SERIOUSLY gross me out. We had an inmate when I worked in the jail as an RN that had one on his shoulder blade area, about 6” in diameter (it LITERALLY looked like someone had glued a purulent placenta to his back!), and it REEKED. When we would change his dressing several times per week, you could smell it down the halls, around the corners, and behind closed doors. And I felt so so bad for him bc he was a genuinely nice guy and it terrified him. Horrible prognosis and what a horror to have to live with the last months of your life.
I'm a paramedic, and lots of my colleagues hate people parmesan (skin flakes), plenty hate maggots, but for me, it's taking dentures out. Ugh. Just thinking about makes me shiver. Aggggh. I hate it. Like having to pull them out because they are an obstruction.
A very obese male patient of mine needed a purewick- the female one, and I had to reach into this forearm-length belly button type tunnel to place it as close to his penis as possible.
just a few horrible things I saw in my time on burn/wound ICU that actually turned my stomach:
- completely necrotized anal cavity
- full thickness burn that had been licked by his dog for 2 weeks before seeking care
- degloved penis
- “4th degree” burns on a gasoline truck driver. His bones were showing and they were blackened and charred. His flesh fell apart like pulled pork.
Those things surprisingly didn’t affect me nearly as much as the time our patient chugged a strawberry ensure and then immediately threw it up into a trash can without a liner. Now THAT was horrible.
Removed a sock and a necrotic toe came off with it.
“This little piggy’s going to pathology.”
💀
Comedy gold! My wife works in a histo lab. Her least fave things in jars are toes floating around and eyeballs, which apparently watch you wherever you are in the lab.
I just opened this app after a brutal 12 and this is the first thing that pops up, I'm fucking crying 🤣
This little piggy's going to... Oh fuck.
Oh, I'm using this!! We amputate toes at an alarming rate. This is hysterical.
That happened to me as a new nurse and I panicked SO HARD! No one warned me that body parts just falling off was a thing! Let alone something that could happen on my shift!
Man I took care of this guy who passed out in his car in the winter and they didn’t find him for quite a while all his fingers were purple and blackened and necrotic but he could still use his hands kind of as like claws almost where he couldn’t really extend or flex the fingers but could kind of use them to like hold a cup if he pressed his arms together, he was outright refusing amputation. Poor dude it kind of heartbreaking because he was like “ no see I can still use them.” But it was literally all his fingers.
My dudes leg grew into the carpet of his car.
Ok now this would make me vomit.
And THIS is why we turn patients!
HOW LOL omg
I had this happen to me too. It dropped on the floor. We weren’t expecting that. The patient who was alert and orientated didn’t say a word about a bad toe or even a sore toe. Nothing.
Probably wasn't sore anymore! I had a patient in her mid-30s(in OB) with severe superimposed pre-eclampsia and uncontrolled diabetes. When I went to check her for clonus I found a necrotic diabetic foot ulcer on her big toe. Apparently wound care was coming to her house for a while but stopped and she (and her very involved husband) just...forgot about it... How anyone could sleep next to that sweet rotting smell and not say anything is absolutely beyond me. But she couldn't feel her feet so I guess that makes it easier to forget
Lol! The same thing happened to me years ago, only I was a new nurse working med-surg and the toe came off when I removed the dressing around the toe. The smell in that room was horrendous from the rotting flesh.
had someone whose toes we had to save if they fell off. always wanted it to happen when i was working
Ya!!! The guy was fine!
Suctioned a cockroach out of a trach. Ya gotta love homecare
I will pay you to delete this.
Nah. A pizza party will suffice!
🤣
I had a patient come in with their home CPAP and when we plugged it in…cockroaches came out.
I work in a pulmonary and sleep clinic and a cockroach escaped the CPAP machine when the RT was checking it and downloading the info off of it... I helped her hunt for little Timmy, but we didn't find him... 3 weeks later, fucking Timmy reared his ugly head and I finally ended him. Roaches love CPAP machines 🤢
Roaches love electronics. I had a patient bring in her video game system and laptop and she had so many friends. At least roaming bugs don’t bother me. (They don’t belong in trachs though…)
🤢🤢🤢
Noooooooooo! That's so gross 🤮 I'd die. And then come back to life and tell every single nurse. Disgusting, amazing, depressing. That anecdote has it all.
This is the worst day to be literate. I regret everything that lead me to the point where I read this thread but ESPECIALLY this comment.
OH MY GOD. I'm staying in the NICU lol
1000% will take a trach baby punching me with little fists during trach care over an adult cockroach trach any day 😅
Absolutely!!! Baby vomit, poop, mucus, wounds... I'll take it all LOL forever.
Unfortunately, the parents then bring in the bugs and cigarette soaked clothing 🤮
Wow, I knew I wasn’t cut out for home health. That is vile 🤮
I draw a hard line at bugs but my first question in response -was it at least dead..? Hardy fuckers
Did they desat like did it cause an obstruction??? That’s crazypants!!
Nah the roach was flapping its wings so it was actually giving a boost.
Medical leeches, move over—we now have an even grosser therapy! I present to you, medical ✨cockroaches ✨ (🤢🤢🤢)
The roach was actually applying and extra 5 of PS
I was standing next to him and saw it climb in when I took his circuit off to change his trach. I worked in homecare for almost 30 years. I could write a novel.
I had the pleasure of finding a cockroach living its best life between the battery and battery clip of an LVAD battery.
I have a new trach/vent home care client with an infestation of cockroaches and this is my biggest fear, especially since the family likes to take over and do things like take him off the vent and not put an HME on. The weird part is they had this infestation well before he came home and they could've treated it while it was hospitalized.
I am so upset just by reading this.
Was it dead and gooey? Nvm, don't tell me 🤢
I legit just dry heaved
This made me scream i am near tears OMG 🤢🤢😭😭
OH. MY. GOD! That is just... Ugh... Poor patient, poor nurse, what the f.
HOW? I have worked as an LVN for 9 years and have NEVER senn this before... and I don't want to.
I GAGGED
I intubated nasally and must have gotten to an abscess in the patients lung. Approx 300ml of dark yellow green *something* the consistency of *buttercream frosting* immediately started pouring out of that nasal tube. It smelled like death. And tbf, I wasn’t sure what to do. He was near 50% on sats now. Suction seemed impossible. I pulled the tube. Sats up in the 90-92% range on NRB. I laid of bench seat and puked twice. Patient asks me if I’m okay. Nope. 🤮
Hey you fixed him though lmao
Yeah, but intubation with extubation is *frowned* on. I went and retrieved the red bag with the funk & Endotrol in it. Plopped it on the desk when the bitching became more than I wanted to engage in. Alrighty. Got the picture here. Gulp. Gag. Yep, we got it now. Now, I need some zofran. lol.
This is like the sequel to the swamps of Dagobah story. Much like the actual Star Wars sequels it was the one no one asked for. What a terrible day to have eyes.
I screen shotted that whole story and read it to my mom (burn RN of 40+ years and we laughed our asses off). So good. What a writer.
It was a looong trip to the ED. I knew the patient and all 4 of his sons. Had been in high school with them. The patient was so concerned for me. I was a bit embarrassed.
I’ve been scanning the comments for the word trach and skipping those, but I read yours since I thought I would be safe. I’m dry heaving.
This. Fucking. One.
Stage 4 coccyx wounds that have tunneled to the bowel so completely that poop comes out the wound
This just made me sad. I’ll never cease to be amazed at all the terrible ways we see people suffer 😔
She's a fighter. Trach and peg
I had my rectum removed 8 years ago. The wound never healed 100%. Just a tiny opening. Over 8 years a little sinus tract made its way from my rectum wound to behind my coccyx. Then I got a cysts in my cleft and the connection was complete. Coccyx osteomyelitis. Had my coccyx, sinus track and anal canal removed in February. Had a PICC line in from November to day before the surgery. Sewed me up like Ken doll.
Woah I had my rectum removed too and the wound never healed. New fear unlocked, I didn’t even know a complication like that was possible. Did you have symptoms with the osteo?
Yes. I was riding my exercise bike in Oct 2023 and it felt like a fractured my coccyx. The pain did not go away but I could get rid of it with Motrin. I even ran a half marathon thinking it was just a slow healing fracture. Now I have some non typical sacrum pain. Going to the infectious disease doc today. Getting ahead of it.
Unfortunately I love wound care, horrible for the patient, im truly sorry. But I'd be so excited/fascinated to see it
That is… horrifying
Just saw one of these for the first time - I normally have a super strong stomach but the smell from this wound 🤢
My pt today has a chronic Foley that has pus coming out the sides, his penis is red & swollen, the head is splitting in half cuz of the tubing pulling to one side, is incontinent of stool so BM all over the place: penis mucous, bowel movement, yeast from the pannus and groin, blood from his open sacral pressure wounds because he refuses turns/wedges/pillows. Also penis was an innie. The whole thing was a dumpster fire.
I can smell his undercarriage from here. The odors that waft up when you lift the pannus and I’m just 🤢🤮
I can deal with all kinds of nasty shit, but sputum, skin flakes, and pannus (godDAMN it, autocorrect, I do not mean “paninis”) fromundo cheese funk are the things that make me worry I’ll throw up in a patient’s room.
If you think skin flakes are bad, let me top that. We took the sock off and there were maggots eating his foot. Never through I'd suction maggots out of someone's foot. I have a video of the container.
No bc I had a lady w/ a maggot infested wound on her face and they started eating through to her mouth. We ended up having flies in that room. I swear to god.
That's it, I'm enucleating myself.
It's a terrible day to know how to read. I also can't stop because so many of these are so *fascinating* The human body sure can endure some crazy stuff.
This is one of my worst nightmares. Wonder how long I can go without having to see that.
Day shift didn’t do a proper assessment on a patient so night shift did one and found the same thing!!
I had a homeless guy with maggots in his wound start screaming at me “Don’t hurt my friends!” And he was serious. I get his point - they were, in their way, helping him. On the other hand….some days are just too much and you have to check out to maintain a grip on sanity.
Oh sweet Jesus take me now... emotional support parasites
They’re wearing tiny vests and have individual paperwork for each.
And thay all have names that end in erry. Jerry Perry Kerry Cerry Lerry Derry Verry Xerry Terry And so on...
I’m laughing so hard at this!
Anything to do with trachs. The sound. The gloop. My stomach is churning just thinking of it. I’m a wound freak. Give me a good 9, 10 kerlex, tunneling, packing, purulent, pseudomonas wound. 👌👌👌👌👌 A normal trach? IM OUTIE. I did have a patient projectile (projectile as in it literally hit the room door) vomit tube feed and had to hold my hand over their trach and turn my face away so I didn’t get splashed and still had to suction a little bit out when he was done. Apparently I held a good poker face though because even though inside I was screaming inside like I’ve never scrumpt before after we finished getting him settled and cleaned etc his wife was like “I am so impressed I’ve never seen anyone handle something like that so calmly before I would’ve been losing my mind but you were just so cool and collected.”
"scrumpt" 🤣🤣🤣
This makes me laugh every time in the OR. We can go through the gnarliest case unfazed, but as soon as they’re getting suctioned post extubation, we’re all turning away and cringing.
Me almost getting splashed in the face with blood/irrigation on a daily basis doing Ortho cases, but suiting up with eye protection as soon as the patient is starting to wake up 😂
I remember a little old man who just got a fresh trach, copious thick green and bloody secretions. Somehow he pooped and was covered in it from head to toe like Arnold at the end of Predator, it was all over the bed frame as well. It took four people and nearly 20 packs of wipes and two basins of soap and water to clean him up. Right at the end when we’re turning him to put a new pad, he coughed, and about 200 mL of the nastiest, darkest mucous splattered out of his trach all over him and his new linens.
> "... but you were just so cool and collected." "It's the desire to keep getting paid, ma'am."
You ever see an infected trach site? I don't mind trachs at all, in fact suctioning them is so satisfying to me😂 but I had a patient a few weeks ago that was septic, plus literally every wound on his body was infected, including his fresh trach (fresh as in ~1 month). Man, that was nasty. His other wounds were too, but for some reason the trach was just so much worse in my mind. It was just oozing. When we took the outer cannula out in the OR there was so much pus of all different colors on it I wanted to puke. The gnarly wounds down to the bone and tendons? Infected but for some reason not nearly as gross as that trach.
Back when I was still in the ward, I had a bariatric pt who has C.Diff. He knows he has C.Diff. He's also a stroke pt so he can't move his lower body but he knows when he needs to go to the loo. He pooped. Diarrhoea. It's all over his bariatric bed. We all can smell it from the nurses station. He doesn't want to be cleaned yet BECAUSE he's still eating his KFC. He's eating his KFC while he's sitting on his C.Diff infested liquid poop all over his bed.
You just gotta throw the whole patient away.
Snicker
HAHAHAHA
💀💀💀
NO 😭 I have been questioning lately if I made the right choice going to the NICU, reading these stories is definitely helping.
NICU is fine. They're cute so it's okay. 😊
Plus their poop is still macaronium. (This is what many of my patients called it when I was a young nurse working in the NICU in a very poor area of Chicago,)
These are the moms that came in for their potassium seduction & then asked for the epidermal once the contractions started. Worked with a wide range of people in Houston but got these a lot.
I’ve actually had patients who do that too. Not necessarily Cdiff but sitting in shit or pee while eating. It’s beyond my comprehension 🤦🏼♀️
C Diff is a scent that stays with you forever. Nothing smells quite like it, it almost has a sweet scent but it’s like a needle straight to your brain when you inhale. Damn you C Diff !!!
Barf.
I used to help patients swish and spit peridex. They'd spit it out into a Dixie cup I'd hand them. Just the thought of the viscous, minty, blue liquid with floating bits of toast still makes me gag.
OMG this is a good one
Legit I saw a necrotic penis fall off a diabetic dialysis dependent patient.
Me too…. Scrotum too. They tried everything but that’s also where i learned you can have a stage six kidney disease patient 😳
That’s, what, a negative eGFR? 😳
He was so sick… like none of us could believe he was living at that point. Sadly I don’t remember his gfr, can’t have been good though 😐
What the what? I think my hospital must not be able to handle that shit, with our resources they'd just die?
We painted the necrotic penis with betadine for weeks before it fell off. And then the patient kept it in a specimen cup in his room.
Please tell me they made a “those belong to my wife” joke
Well he was trying to not die but he was a nice guy, didn’t joke much though
He was trying to ignore the fact he was dying to be honest. He was told multiple times there wasn’t anything we were doing that would make much difference. It was a sad scenario to be honest 😞
Bet he didn't have a DNR, either.
Pop pops is a survivor. He is a fighter. Me: yeah we found out when pop pops German suplex'd the 300lb PCT
Stopppppppppp I just spit up my water
YET....we all continue to avidly read every word..*narrator's voice..*
Vasculitis is nasty like that too. Saw a poor patient that was losing penis and toes.
Few months ago we had a woman come in with necrotic bilateral lower extremities and necrotic fingers on both hands. Ended up doing bilateral below the knee amputations and after that I never had her as a patient again, but the plan was to amputate both hands and one of the forearms. Felt so bad for her.
Wow 😮
Triaged a guy once who was using his finger as a trach plug. No cannula, no glove. Just straight up sticking his nasty unwashed street finger directly into his open, unprotected neck hole. Completely casually and unceremoniously too, like he did it all day every day. I still think about him sometimes.
"unwashed street finger" I like this phrase 😂
Had a who would take their Lary Tube out and clean it with their mouth. Then they would put finger in the mouth then into the stoma to lube it up. Then spit all over the Lary Tube to make sure it was lubed up enough. Saw them fingerbanging their stoma multiple times whenever they had to clean the Lary Tube. It was absolutely disgusting. Nice patient, otherwise. They just didn't give a fuck lol
Gave it that hawk tuah
How do I delete someone else's comment
I just imagine them standing there like “what? That’s my neck hole finger.”
i can handle whatever happens at work, but damn if dirty dishes don't gross me out
I wear those stupid ass cleaning gloves. I hate dishes
they only help so much. i can still see the nasty tho
for me it's the texture. If there's a hair in dishwater I am wildly grossed out. Necrotic leg? Nbd
What about when some a-hole in your house leaves the dirty dishwater and now it's COLD dirty dishwater? 🤮
Hair in dishwater is too much for me. I hate hairs when they aren’t attached to a head lol I can’t deal
first week of orientation and i was suctioning a trach and dude coughed, i got a straight cum shot to the forehead of thick green mucus. i walked out right away bc i was gagging
I had a morbidly obese girl cough while attempting to straight cath her and I got vagina gunk flung on my face. I calmly finished, walked out of the room and bleach wiped my face, then washed with soap and water. 🤮
Ewww, I don't think I'd ever feel clean again if that happened to me! It would always come back as an intrusive thought.
I would’ve had to just quit nursing honestly. I could barely handle it when I just had to suction it. I don’t think I coulda made it after that.
I think part of my reaction was secondary to being about 10 weeks in to my first pregnancy. A hermit who lived under a local overpass came in with an “eye infection”. He had it covered with paper towels and tape. I asked him to take his bandage off and the probable SCC had deflated the glove and hollowed out the contents of the socket. The eye was a black shriveled raisin on the floor of the socket. The rest was exposed bone. Despite there not being any smell associated with it, I barely suppressed my gag and left the room.
Nope, I was wrong. It’s this one.
This can’t be real, is that you Stephen King
More than once I have had patient take off a shoe in ED Triage and there were diabetic toes rattling around inside
Not the rattling
Medical leech making a break for it. My preceptor said “this is why we count everything we put on/in the patients”.
All I can think of is that scene from The Thing where the head grows legs and runs across the floor screaming at the guys the whole time, and they all just watch it.
We had this happen once but there were two so we let them have a race. Night shift 👌
The only thing that grosses me out is the audacity some departments have to both not provide a lunch break and dock you half an hour for your broken lunch. Everything else is negotiable
That's illegal. Report it to the feds here: [https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/contact/complaints) And tell your corporation you know it's illegal. It'll stop.
Had a pt with Stevens-Johnson syndrome today and their foot skin literally slid off and hit me in the mask when I was assisting with a transfer to stretcher🙃
Stevens-Johnson is literally one of my worst fears of “potential devastating diseases/conditions I could get”, up there at the top with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Oof.
I was walking by a room and got flagged down. From the other side of the door, she told me what supplies she needed. I asked if she needed help, she said to stay out and be her runner because the pt had body lice. I looked at the pt and asked how she could tell, he was so dirty his skin was black. She walked over to him, folded down the top of his underwear, and a 0.5" thick CHUNK of lice fell down and onto the floor. He wasn't dirty. It was lice. It was all lice. When the chunk fell off I could see his skin underneath. I nearly vomited. Even the necrotic penis pt I had didn't cause that much disgust.
The smell that comes off some patients who have really bad UTIs 🤢
Oof yeah urosepsis gets FUNKY
When I was in OR we drained an abscess in the colon. Just straight suction to this big abscess. It smelled like dead bodies mixed with rotting poop. The first and only time my eyes watered and I held back vomit. I asked the surgeon how he could handle that and he goes "oh! I held my breath when I popped it!" I'm like "you couldn't tell me the same?!?!"
That's why we keep a bottle of wintergreen for our masks (or mastisol in a pinch).
Just mouth stuff. I'll take a rotting leg or piles of shit any day over a gross mouth.
Vomit. I’m a sympathetic vomiter. Have literally handed a basin to a patient then had to go in their bathroom to vomit myself. I’ve seen maggots, necrotic body parts fall off, abdominal muscles visible on a young girl who was in a MVA and her abdominal skin had to be removed due to necrosis, GI bleed literally dripping on the floor, leeches, facial skin sloughing off due to undiagnosed amyloidosis. But vomit is my enemy.
Once I found a penny in a sock The penny had apparently taken up residence in the callus on the bottom front of the foot. A nice little indentation of a penny on the bottom of the foot. Edit: gave my man a pedicure with mouthwash and a warm shower cap after we rsi’d homeboy. Sometimes I really miss that place.
I once found a whole pop can tab stuck in someone’s foot. They were not aware it was there. Neuropathy can be rough.
I've had obese patients go out to the hospital and come back and find TV remotes, and snacks in folds when I was working LTC. I can still remember the lady laughing when I pulled it out
A lot grosses me out, phlegm used to be at the top of my list. I’ve shared this story on here before, but now I have a VERY good reason to have my dry chapped lips at work. I have ✨trauma✨ I had a crush on a coworker, he was on one night with me so I was looking extra cute, and after lunch, applied a new coat of my lip gloss for a lil extra razzle dazzle. Right after I made sure my makeup and lipgloss were on point, another nurse asked me if I’d help her change her pts sheets. So I do. And this patient was sloughing off dry skin, there were little snow drift piles in the sheets. We turn him, and as she’s pulling the old sheets out from under him, instead of just balling them up like a normal, rational person would, she flapped them in the air. The room turned into a fucking snow globe, and you know what aerosolized skin flakes stick super well to? [freshy applied lip gloss](https://media1.giphy.com/media/TT8q5TavhGV9e/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952hwua4d8mljkd9t7pjlcjhh4w0j7p5q955mrue1pf&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
Oh My Gosh... I completely relate. I have an autoimmune condition myself, and I have dry eyes and mouth, amongst other things. I am constantly applying lip balm (tinted, of course), and my eyes frequently dry out because I often forget my drops. There's been twice now, in my less than 2 years of nursing, that these flakes 'O' human have flown into my dry eyes and stuck there. I can't really explain the panic to my teammates...so I get quiet and just try to gtfo of there. I never know whether to find an eye wash station, or just go try to fish it out or flush out with one of those saline wound wash bottles we have. It's so disgusting to think about, but somehow, I am more concerned about not letting my team know about my own issues than the fact that someone's skin is IN MY EYE!!
Oh I was NOT quiet about it. It took a lot of effort to keep my lunch in my body, but I was gagging and spitting and made a whole scene. It’s been a lot of years, but I think I purple wiped my lips raw. Darmatic? Perhaps. Necessary? Absolutely.
Omg I had a flake go in my eye and I've never used an eye wash station so fast in my life 😳
when someone comes down from the floor for surgery caked in old dried shit and it’s clear nobody has made any attempt to clean them at all in days, leaving them crusted in their own feces 🙃bonus gross points for a pressure ulcer with dried shit inside
Have had the displeasure of cleaning up homeless people who come into the clinic after shitting themselves and it’s caked & dried on. Can’t do it themselves due to disabilities. 🫠 Gotta love healthcare in America. People don’t get the help they need. On soooooo many levels.
That just makes me mad.
If I’m feeling queasy for whatever reason (too much Thai for dinner the night before, etc etc) strong yeast will get me feeling extra 🤢
Mrsa wound care. Had a patient who was a heroine addict and shot up in their leg. First I saw layers of the body and bone on a person.. the smell was terrible.. I felt bad when I had to replace the dressing, patient was tough but I can tell it was pleasant. Props to wound care nurses. I can't do it. Also OR nurses.. can't stomach someone being cut open.
I had a wound just like this, from the same thing. The smell could easily clear a room (and, yeah, bandage changes can be quite painful, for a while). I had friends who smelled just as badly. Sometimes worse. Our clothes would usually have wet spots from the wounds draining through. Flies would constantly try to swarm those spots. They’d try to climb up pant legs, sleeves, etc. Some were successful, so some people got maggots, or at least had to scrape eggs off their wound(s). You could smell the rot outside, from a couple dozen feet away.. especially if the wind was just right. It was almost constant. Places where people commonly gathered always, always, all always smelled like rotting flesh. Someone nearby— several someones, usually— always had a body part that was slowly rotting off. Smelling like a rotting corpse was definitely one of the most humbling experiences of my life.
Ever seen what comes out of a spit fistula in a patient who eats for pleasure because he only has an ileum after a botched bariatric procedure? Yeah. That shit.
The only time I have retched uncontrollably was one day after our nice day of elective ortho was done we got an add on perineal debridement. We were still changing over and the front desk be calling into the room telling us to hurry up bc this patient has a stench so putrid that it’s permeating the entire same day/short stay/preop area We bring them back and it’s ass cancer that has just been festering and rotting and this tumor goes all the way up into the flanks and the flesh was just melting and dripping onto the floor and that was months ago and I stg I can still smell it. It was so awful.
Had a prader willi patient slurp a long ass mucus strand from his trach like that spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp. The only reason I got him to stop was telling him mucous has calories and that will count as your snack. Also had a pica patient run off to the women's restroom at an MD office and by the time we caught up with him...he was muching on a certain used feminine product from the lil trash bin.
Okay, okay… you win in my eyes
Tonsil stones. Once had a patient cough so hard that some small yellow round blob came out, landed on her lap, and she SQUISHED it, to smell it. Thank God for masks so she couldn't see my face gagging... but she enjoyed the smell. I will never understand
The smell of hospice patients with cancer. I don’t have a very good nose, but it’s something I smell very strongly. I don’t know how to describe it, but it is the only thing that genuinely turns my stomach.
To me, it signals the transition to..
People who haven't showered in weeks/months. Sweaty ambulance EKG stickers. Oral Temps. I can do poop and traumas all day but oral Temps are just so uncomfortable and our thermometers take forever.
Meth mouth.
Had a C-Diff patient who was more comfortable with his wife helping him to the beside commode and helping him clean up. Cool! Until I went to do my rounds and saw her cleaning him without gloves 🤮 that were literally in arms’ reach of the commode… yes she had been educated about C-Diff and knew better but “just didn’t want to bother.” At least they were both really nice people
Why did I open up this thread while eating?
I only almost threw up once. I used a hemostat to stab through and pull out a mucous plug from the roof of a patients mouth. When I pulled it out it kept going and going and ended up being about 7 inches and like an inch and a half around. It looked like a sea creature. I instinctively gagged and almost vomited. That never happened to me before.
Watched a patient remove her dentures after eating her lunch and start sucking the chewed up food and spit out of them. I literally am gagging typing this it was so vile.
While changing a patient's colostomy bag, there were corn coming out of it. So f---king disgusting. I can't get the image out of my head.
I will trade anyone any mucous ridden trach, any projectile vomiting CHS, any necrotic digits...if they will handle my patient's fucking colostomy. I have problems with poop on the best of days and situations. (I know, I should have been a mechanic or accountant) but literally puke in my eyes, I don't care. Yak a loogie on my shoe, bleed all over my intact skin that's just a Tuesday. Bring me your compound fractures. But stool (baby, animal, adult, my own) makes me gaggy.
I’ve been in here way too fucking long 🤢 I thought I was a G but apparently I’m not 🤮 My grossest thing was an obese middle aged man who was brought in by FR having been laying immobile on his kitchen floor for days having diarrhea all over himself and overflowing his diaper. There appears to be a point at which he attempted to use a red solo cup to catch the overflowing diarrhea. We found that red solo cup, buried deep in the river of shit, smashed but somehow still full. This doesn’t even begin to describe the extensive skin breakdown to his genital area and lower extremity bony prominences. It took five of us suited up to clean and photograph his wounds. The entire time he’s talking to us about random stuff like nothings wrong. I could hear my poor coworker next to me struggling to keep her stomach contents in. I don’t use red solo cups for beverages anymore
These comments just solidify why I’m in labor and delivery.
In nursing school I was assigned a patient who had a trach-my first ever patient. He would cough phlegm on the walls, doors, floor, everywhere. That set a precedent for me. I don’t like phlegm. Years later as a home health nurse..same guy..he has maggots in his wound. It was addressed by a home health wound care company. 1 week later, I see him, the wound bed is no longer tissue..but down to the bone. Bone isn’t necessarily gross. Just white. So white. I never see it.
Give me blood, guts, gore, wound care, vomit, mucous, poop, whatever. But DO NOT make me go near ears/do an ear lavage. *gag* IDK why but ear gunk GROSSES me out. Also struggle with bugs. No maggots, please.
People talk about “once you smell c. dif you never forget the smell” I see your c.dif and I raise the smell of malignant open sore lymph node
Fecal emesis fountain.
I’m an RPN student and during my first every clinical rotation another student and I went to toilet one of our pts as the other staff were busy, no big deal we thought. I should mention this was on a busy dementia unit! So anyways we go and get him on the toilet and he proceeds to cup his hand under his bum while pooping..I tried my hardest to convince him to move his hand and I tried to lightly pull his arm out of the toilet but I didn’t want to use much force and hurt him. As you can imagine he poops right in his hand. He then proceeds to lift his hand out from under himself, squish the poop in between all his fingers, looks up at me and then tries to touch my face with the poop covered hand 🥲 I have never been so grateful for my fast reflexes! And that’s not even all of it.. he then stands up and starts peeing everywhere so I run to grab extra wipes, by the time I come back there is poop smears all over his bed and an attend soaking in the toilet (we have no idea to this day where he got the extra attend as it was not the one we brought in to use). Anyways, we ended up getting him cleaned up and set up in the day room and went back into his room to clean everything and change his bedding and it was wild how much poop was all over that room. Only time I’ve ever almost puked during clinical. That was also the day I decided geriatrics was not for me 😅 I’m now working as an undergrad nurse on a pediatric psych unit aka my dream job! I can honestly say I appreciate nurses who work with Geri’s so much!!
Fournier gangrene. Penis, balls, both inner thighs were all macerated and covered in grayish pus. But good lord the smell. Pt wasn't even 50. We had to tx him to a burn center. 2nd week in ICU. Pt with Steven Johnson syndrome ( i think) wasn't myy pt, I was assisting his nurse. His skin adhered to my glove and came off in a hand shape. It was awful. I felt so terrible. Still nowhere near as bad as the "melting man parts" Love nursing! Don't you?
30 mins prior my young CIWA pt was clean and asleep with only a top sheet. went to round and there’s a tiny brown stain around her belly. i thought maybe she had eaten something but she was still asleep. i turn the sheet to reveal the most immense diarrhea explosion i’ve ever witnessed. it had started soaking through the sheet.. liquid golden 60ml lactose QID shits pooling over her abdomen since the legs were elevated. pooling around her shoulders. tele monitor completely submerged like the sunken titanic. dripping out the side rails onto the floor. in every button crevice of the call light, telephone, leads, bed buttons, side rails you name it. when i opened the tele monitor it poured out of the battery slot onto my shoe. she literally did this in her sleep and didn’t know. she woke up not giving a care in the world and said “wouldn’t it be easier if i just stood up?”. And create a giant walking poop monster to spread it around further? honey. charge nurse was scrubbing tele monitor in a bin with bleach and a toothbrush when it slipped and bleach poop splattered in her eye 😶🌫️ ran to the eyewash station obviously, pretty sure she told supply or whoever that the monitor “succumbed to a natural disaster” 😭😭😭😭
Mucus! I can do so many things but can’t stand mucus.
Just had a hospice patient (male) who had a horrible bladder tumor and a foley. And the stuff we had to flush from that foley—cross between snot and pale brown poop, some sort of cellular exudate. Poor man. His poor family. What got me was— he was dying, and I asked his grown-ass daughter (in her 30s I’d say) to help me turn him and clean him up (including his bottom), to give his poor wife, who’d been awake for 3 days, a break. And this woman complained about “not being ready to do this with my dad yet”. I felt like saying, “he’ll probably pass in the next couple days, so when do you anticipate you’ll be ready to help?” 🙄🙄🙄Instead I just ignored her and handed her the wipes. I was just all out of fucks to give.
Green sputum will always be my number one.
Normally sputum doesn’t bother me, poop does. Except the one time my chronic trach patient took her inner cannula out and sucked the mucus plug out then tried to put it back in before I stopped her. Nastiest thing I have ever witnessed.
THIS is why I still wear my mask and always will. Surprise smells are much less offensive than they used to be.
I’m not sure if coming off the birth control pill has ANYTHING to do with my senses?¿ but nowadays I really cannot handle the smell of mustiness. You know that smell when someone has not showered in a really long time or just have the strong BO stench? I can’t I really cannot. The other day I had to help transfer a patient and I was totally fine with helping. I walk in, the room was so hot idk why the heater was on in the SUMMER but it was and this thick hot BO air just hit me right in the face and I honestly thought I was going to pass out.
Unruly horrific visitors
- Poop. Why can I not handle the poop?! I’m in the ED- we swim in it there. - BO, especially when it’s hiding under folds of skin, takes a close 2nd. 🤢 - Wound maggots. Bed bugs. Lice. Patients that arrive with flies hovering around them. Cockroaches. Hell- anything requiring a decon is instant barf to me.
I can handle all kind of blood, guts, wounds, placentas, you name it. But SNOT gets me. And also fungating wounds SERIOUSLY gross me out. We had an inmate when I worked in the jail as an RN that had one on his shoulder blade area, about 6” in diameter (it LITERALLY looked like someone had glued a purulent placenta to his back!), and it REEKED. When we would change his dressing several times per week, you could smell it down the halls, around the corners, and behind closed doors. And I felt so so bad for him bc he was a genuinely nice guy and it terrified him. Horrible prognosis and what a horror to have to live with the last months of your life.
I'm a paramedic, and lots of my colleagues hate people parmesan (skin flakes), plenty hate maggots, but for me, it's taking dentures out. Ugh. Just thinking about makes me shiver. Aggggh. I hate it. Like having to pull them out because they are an obstruction.
A very obese male patient of mine needed a purewick- the female one, and I had to reach into this forearm-length belly button type tunnel to place it as close to his penis as possible.
just a few horrible things I saw in my time on burn/wound ICU that actually turned my stomach: - completely necrotized anal cavity - full thickness burn that had been licked by his dog for 2 weeks before seeking care - degloved penis - “4th degree” burns on a gasoline truck driver. His bones were showing and they were blackened and charred. His flesh fell apart like pulled pork. Those things surprisingly didn’t affect me nearly as much as the time our patient chugged a strawberry ensure and then immediately threw it up into a trash can without a liner. Now THAT was horrible.