Sunday, July 11, 2010

Bad Hair Day #2 and ER Humor

I think it's karma or maybe my hair is in the wrong place at the very wrong time. Night before last I came to work sporting not so nice hair and nothing happened. What I mean was someone could have thrown up on my head and my hair wouldn't have looked worse. Tonight I came to work and was fairly comfortable with my hair color, style and cut. Jamie said she thought it looked nice and I had several other compliments from the in patient side of the hospital. I should have taken that as an omen and put on a shower cap. Jamie was catheterizing an elderly woman and due to the patient's size and anatomy she attempted once by herself and missed, placing the catheter in the vaginal vault. I came to help her by holding the patient's leg to make visualization easier. I bend down to make sure that I had appropriately positioned the part of her anatomy that was causing a problem and got slapped in the head with the catheter. The very same catheter that had previously been in her nether region. I just looked up at Jamie, who was a deep shade of red(in an effort not to laugh) The catheter was replaced with a new one and the procedure was performed without a problem. Jamie used a Clorox wipe to clean my hair. It really is pretty funny when you think about it. Maybe you have to be a nurse though, to find the humor. Things happen at work that would make a non medical person blush and we find great humor. One of my very best buddies came to work one night and commented that she had gas. She watched as a patient was taken from the first room to xray and knew that she would be gone for a while. The other nurse and I sat there as she backed her butt into the 'vacated' room, not realizing what she was about to do( I promise I would have stopped her if I had known.... well maybe I would have...ha). She bend over and "tooted" then walked out. The other nurse and I just stared at her in such a way that she realized that something was wrong. What she didn't know was that the patient had been accompanied by a relative who was still in the darkened room. I just put my head on the desk and nearly cried I was laughing so hard. Another time I was attempting to force activated charcoal into a small tube that had been inserted into a patient's stomach via his nose. The patient had overdosed on drugs and the charcoal is used to (simplified) soak up all the loose pills so that the pill fragments can be carried out of the body. Faye warned me that I was squeezing the tube too hard and that it might burst. The next thing I know Faye is covered in liquid charcoal from her head to her waist and I didn't have a thing on me. Honest to God I didn't know what to do. "Oops" just doesn't seem enough. I frequently will warn a patient prior to giving a shot by saying "BIG STICK" while I am injecting. Linda one time walked into the room of a very heavy patient and after wiping the injection site on her butt, said to the patient "BIG BUTT". Talk about a Freudian slip. She refused to return to the ER till the patient had been discharged. Stay tuned, in the next few days I am going to post a list of our most mispronounced words that we hear in the ER.

2 comments:

Carrie White said...

Laughing out load. Oh my gosh!!

Anonymous said...

OMG, I'm crying from the laughter! I miss you guys so much, I need to come back there!!
Sheila