I come from a medical family. My father is a doctor and my mother is a nurse who finished her career as an X-ray technician. I even worked for three years as a nurse’s aide at a hospital as a teenager, and my grandmother was even a nurse’s aide. I guess you could say that caring for sick people runs in our family. It’s very rewarding and the fact is, people need help when they’re sick. A lot of the time, there are just things that are so technical that people don’t understand, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Also, sometimes if someone’s sick they’re not thinking clearly and may not have fast answers to questions. However, there are some common-sense issues that people should just instinctively know. I can tell you that in my short career as a nurse’s aide, I saw and heard some things that made me think humanity may be doomed. And my family members have told some crazy stories over the dinner table (never mentioning a patient’s name, of course). Enjoy this list of crazy things nurses and doctors have seen or heard.
1.”I’m never going to have a baby because the hospitals don’t wash them anymore.”
She’s 30.
2. I once had a 20-year-old female patient who didn’t know that having sex would lead to pregnancy. She had no idea.
3. After looking at the patient’s chart and seeing she had diabetes-
Me: Do you have any medical conditions?
Patient: No
Me: Are you sure, you’ve never been told you have any diseases?
Patient: Never
Me: What medications do you take?
Patient: Insulin…for my diabetes
4. A middle-aged lady in the operating theatre once told us at the last minute (as she was being wheeled in) that she’s allergic to latex. Everyone freaks out cos so much of the stuff we use in theatre has latex in it, so we take her to the latex-free theatre and do her surgery there. When she’s in recovery and awake I enquire as to what reaction she has to latex. “I just don’t really like the sound the latex gloves make, dear”. I just turned around and walked out.
5. “No, my fiancee and I don’t want our daughter to have any of the vaccines, vitamin K shot, antibiotic eye ointment, or PKU testing. It’s poison. Poking her with the needle is worse than the ‘cold’ she’d get without the ‘poison’.” He then drove his newborn daughter and fiance home in a car that absolutely reeked of weed and cigarettes.
6. 20-something-year-old patient comes to ER, chief complaint on the board is “private.” This should be good. Go in, he is visibly depressed and sad. Tells a story about how he slept with a woman, didn’t use protection, and after he noticed she had a “plastic box on her.” When she told him it was an insulin pump for diabetes he was mortified. Came in immediately to be tested for diabetes.
7. “I had asthma when I was a child, so stop f**king patronizing me and telling me how to raise my daughter just because you think you’re smarter than me”. Leaves hospital. Back in hospital two hours later; six-year-old daughter in respiratory failure and admitted to ICU.
8. “Don’t eat or drink anything after midnight” before his 3-year-old daughter’s surgery the next morning (tonsils and adenoids). While intubating his daughter the next morning, she vomited scrambled eggs, causing her to aspirate them into her lungs. Her heart stopped, and I did chest compressions on her for 25 minutes. We got her back, aborted the surgery, and transferred her to the pediatric ICU on a ventilator. Her father’s response…” She said she was hungry. I thought you were being too hard on her. It must have been something you did to her.”
9. The patient had to be told that the reason her son was getting sick at school every day was that she was packing him peanut butter sandwiches and he was allergic to peanuts. She honestly didn’t know that was an ingredient, and he was in middle school and wasn’t bright enough to realize it himself.
10. Had a lady measure her baby’s temperature by preheating the oven and putting one hand in front of it while the other hand was on the baby’s forehead. She told the nurse her baby’s fever was about 250 degrees.
11. The best was the woman who was feeding her 3-month-old dog every few days for no other reason than she thought a dog should only eat that often. Came in for hypoglycemia (of course). The nurse who spoke with her has no patience for this kind of jacked ignorance, and actually shouted at her “DO YOU EAT EVERY THREE DAYS!?”
12. Once had a patient who was prescribed an inhaler for his cat allergy. He came back a week later saying he was none the better. Turns out he was spraying the inhaler on his cat.
13. My favorite was when someone was prescribed estrogen patches and told to stick one patch on herself every other day. At the next follow-up, she said she didn’t like the patches because she’d been “running out of space” I didn’t think to clarify to her that she should have been placing a new patch and removing the one from yesterday each day. Very amusing. She indeed was covered in sticky patches.
14. Mom brought her kids to the ER after they ate all of their Halloween candy because they had tummy aches. They were still eating Reese’s peanut butter cups when they were in the exam room. I had to explain to her that they need to cut back on the candy and she looked at me like I had three heads.
15. There was this lady who had diabetes and her foot was necrotic. The doctor told her she was going to have to have it amputated, and she said “No, Jesus will heal it for me” (or something like that.) The Doctor looked at her and said “Ma’am, you have maggots eating your foot. Jesus wants you to get it amputated.”
