Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Snake Charmers... or not..
I work in a hosptial. You all get that.
So don't become offended or particuarly paranoid upon your next hospital stay when I say this, but units tend to nickname certain patients. Absoloutly not out of malice, but as a quick means of identifying a particular patient based mostly on diagnosis and personality features (and not by name, which the HIPAA people generally frown on...). It makes giving report to the new shift nurses easier and more memorable -- you can tell the "Old-Guy-Who-Grinds-His-Teeth" from the "Drummer-Woman-With-No-Legs". It makes transfer between units (ie: from the ED (also known as the ER to non-healthcare workers) to the medical floor) far easier when you can know to expect "Asthma-Lady-Who-Might-Be-Crazy", and hell, even easier to identify her when she arrives.
So please, imagine my absoloutle delight when (after a fairly grueling morning with "The-Old-Guy-Who-Keeps-Shaking-His-Fist-At-Me" and "Asian-Woman-With-All-The-Piercings-And-Spongebob-Pillow") I hear tell that we are getting a new admission from the ED.
He has been lovingly dubbed "Young-Guy-Who-Has-A-Snakebite-On-His-Scrotum".
I had a million images racing through my packed little nurse's brain (not at all dissimilar to the images running through your own right now). Millions of questions, suppositions -- but most of all, a dire need to find some reason to see this patient (I blame it on my innate need to learn from experience). I had my plate full of "total-care" patients and really had no time to spare for the Gent's chomped genitals. I immediately found my fellow student nurse who was assigned to the case. Her mission, and she had no choice but to accept, was to calmly admit the patient (and his rumored reDONKulously swollen man bits) and perform a full assessment, including a very detailed account of how this unfortunate incident occured (and then report directly back to me). If I was going to be stuck all day bathing, wiping, injecting, coddling, feeding and medicating (which I'm totally ok with -- it's part of the job), then at the very least I could count on a very good story to brighten my mood.
And sadly, that's where the excitement ends. Upon assessment, the nursing student learned that there had been a misunderstanding in the transfer-- and the exciting story of how a young dude got to third base with a snake was suddenly much more like a story about a fairly daft young dude with a swollen (correction: reDONKulously swollen) THUMB due to a confrontation with a snake (and by confrontation it was more like : he was drunk, saw the snake and thought, 'Hey, I oughta pick that up".) Don't be fooled, though. I did take the opportunity to convince this young nursing student that her role in his care would include her having to suck the venom out of his thumb (it would have been better joke if it had actually been a bite to the sack, no?). Even better, a few staff nurses backed me up and we had this young thing (who spends more time with a flat-iron than should be considered normal) convinced she'd be spending the next hour with his thumb in her mouth. Ahh, undergraduates are so gullible.
OH but I was so disappointed. I had been counting on that singular story to carry me through the rest of the shift. It was hardly worth conjuring up some reason for me to go in to check it out. I didn't even bother. I've seen THUMBS. A few weeks ago we had a rather large gentleman admitted with an injury to his thumb. Apparently, as the story goes, he was attempting to take his elderly and somewhat 'demented' (his own words..) feline to be euthanized. In a final blaze of glory the cat struck back and gave him one final chomp on the thumb -- landing him in the hospital for several days to recover from the infection (don't get me started on the cesspool that is a cat's mouth.. I love them, I have two of them, but I know mine spend at least 60% of their day licking their own or eachother's ass.. enough said). The cat, sadly, did not escape his doom and was put to sleep, though probably for him, a sleep of the righteously vindicated. (You must admit, though, that the mental image of this 250+ lb man (um, "Cat-Scratch-Man") being laid up in the hospital by, what I imagine to be, a scrawny, demented fur ball is, in itself, HIGHLY amusing). And so forgive my blase' attitude regarding another dude with a thumb issue.
You have to wonder, what happened to the snake? From what I understood of dude, the snake was better off getting him in the thumb. And what's more -- you could hear dude out in the hall wailing about the end of his short lived modeling career. A thumb model?
Ha, maybe now Adonis will keep his hands (and his scrotum) to himself while in the woods.
So don't become offended or particuarly paranoid upon your next hospital stay when I say this, but units tend to nickname certain patients. Absoloutly not out of malice, but as a quick means of identifying a particular patient based mostly on diagnosis and personality features (and not by name, which the HIPAA people generally frown on...). It makes giving report to the new shift nurses easier and more memorable -- you can tell the "Old-Guy-Who-Grinds-His-Teeth" from the "Drummer-Woman-With-No-Legs". It makes transfer between units (ie: from the ED (also known as the ER to non-healthcare workers) to the medical floor) far easier when you can know to expect "Asthma-Lady-Who-Might-Be-Crazy", and hell, even easier to identify her when she arrives.
So please, imagine my absoloutle delight when (after a fairly grueling morning with "The-Old-Guy-Who-Keeps-Shaking-His-Fist-At-Me" and "Asian-Woman-With-All-The-Piercings-And-Spongebob-Pillow") I hear tell that we are getting a new admission from the ED.
He has been lovingly dubbed "Young-Guy-Who-Has-A-Snakebite-On-His-Scrotum".
I had a million images racing through my packed little nurse's brain (not at all dissimilar to the images running through your own right now). Millions of questions, suppositions -- but most of all, a dire need to find some reason to see this patient (I blame it on my innate need to learn from experience). I had my plate full of "total-care" patients and really had no time to spare for the Gent's chomped genitals. I immediately found my fellow student nurse who was assigned to the case. Her mission, and she had no choice but to accept, was to calmly admit the patient (and his rumored reDONKulously swollen man bits) and perform a full assessment, including a very detailed account of how this unfortunate incident occured (and then report directly back to me). If I was going to be stuck all day bathing, wiping, injecting, coddling, feeding and medicating (which I'm totally ok with -- it's part of the job), then at the very least I could count on a very good story to brighten my mood.
And sadly, that's where the excitement ends. Upon assessment, the nursing student learned that there had been a misunderstanding in the transfer-- and the exciting story of how a young dude got to third base with a snake was suddenly much more like a story about a fairly daft young dude with a swollen (correction: reDONKulously swollen) THUMB due to a confrontation with a snake (and by confrontation it was more like : he was drunk, saw the snake and thought, 'Hey, I oughta pick that up".) Don't be fooled, though. I did take the opportunity to convince this young nursing student that her role in his care would include her having to suck the venom out of his thumb (it would have been better joke if it had actually been a bite to the sack, no?). Even better, a few staff nurses backed me up and we had this young thing (who spends more time with a flat-iron than should be considered normal) convinced she'd be spending the next hour with his thumb in her mouth. Ahh, undergraduates are so gullible.
OH but I was so disappointed. I had been counting on that singular story to carry me through the rest of the shift. It was hardly worth conjuring up some reason for me to go in to check it out. I didn't even bother. I've seen THUMBS. A few weeks ago we had a rather large gentleman admitted with an injury to his thumb. Apparently, as the story goes, he was attempting to take his elderly and somewhat 'demented' (his own words..) feline to be euthanized. In a final blaze of glory the cat struck back and gave him one final chomp on the thumb -- landing him in the hospital for several days to recover from the infection (don't get me started on the cesspool that is a cat's mouth.. I love them, I have two of them, but I know mine spend at least 60% of their day licking their own or eachother's ass.. enough said). The cat, sadly, did not escape his doom and was put to sleep, though probably for him, a sleep of the righteously vindicated. (You must admit, though, that the mental image of this 250+ lb man (um, "Cat-Scratch-Man") being laid up in the hospital by, what I imagine to be, a scrawny, demented fur ball is, in itself, HIGHLY amusing). And so forgive my blase' attitude regarding another dude with a thumb issue.
You have to wonder, what happened to the snake? From what I understood of dude, the snake was better off getting him in the thumb. And what's more -- you could hear dude out in the hall wailing about the end of his short lived modeling career. A thumb model?
Ha, maybe now Adonis will keep his hands (and his scrotum) to himself while in the woods.
# posted by Cathy @ 9:21:00 PM 
