You'd think by now I wouldn't be surprised by anything. When you work in an Emergency department you see a lot of strange and shocking things, yet even after working in this dept. 5 years I still get grossed out and surprised to see things like a nurse strolling through the ER holding a bag of ice covering someone's amputated fingers..
Nasty..
One of the biggest challenges I face on a regular basis is just trying to keep confused patients in bed. I don't blame them, those stretchers were not made for long stays.
So one shift, not too long ago, I had a very pleasantly confused gentlemen as a patient. This man had been brought in during the night by EMS after being found in a bad state in a subway station. He had got into some kind of altercation which left him with facial fractures and a subarachnoid hemorrhage ..he was bleeding inside his brain.
This guy couldn't tell me where he was or what day it was, although he knew he had been in a fight and lost. He was determined to get out of that stretcher!
So to keep him safe, the doctor ordered a sitter to stay with him. Eventually a short, energetic man arrived and promptly got to his job of keeping Patient X in his stretcher. This sitter took his job way too seriously though and every time Patient X so much as scratched his nose, he would jump up and say 'No Mr.X! You must stay in your bed!' To which Mr.X would respond by swinging his fist at him.
It was getting to the point that the sitter was actually making Mr.X pretty aggravated. They would just sit there glaring at each other.
Eventually the sitter requested to go on his lunch break. And both me and Mr.X was like, 'yes! Please go!' The bad part was that just as the sitter went for lunch more patients started pouring in and I had
to attend to them.
I had been gone less than ten minutes when I noticed trail of blood leading from Mr. X's room all the
way down the hall. Mr. X was gone! And his IV was dangling from his IV poll..saline solution
pouring all over the floor.
All I had to do was follow the trail of blood and I found Mr.X. He was all the way across the ER scaring some visitors when both I and security arrived to escort him back to his room. I was so frazzled at this point! I started scolding him: ' Mr. X I told you not to get out of bed! You could've fallen! Man you're fast! I was gone like two seconds!'
And he was just laughing and responded, ' not fast enough or else I wouldn't of got in that fight!'
True..
In any case, I finally got him back to bed and his IV put back in. The sitter came back from break shortly after and asked, 'did he behave for you?' And I was like: 'no! He was very bad!'
Mr. X just lied there, eyes closed..smirking
