Chapter 9 - If It Makes You Feel Any Better

Man, that was rough – wasn’t it!? This chapter is more light-hearted. I promise.

When going through nursing school, meeting new coworkers, and living the full-blown nursey life, everyone wants to be the best possible nurse they can be. They want to project that image to everyone so that everyone thinks they’re competent and never mess up.

If you ask any seasoned nurse about the biggest mistake they’ve made, it usually starts a hilarious and interesting conversation. These nurses are typically secure in themselves, and can admit the mistakes that have made them better. And it makes you feel more human as a newbie that there are not these unrealistic expectations.

(Note: nurses that say they haven’t made mistakes are liars.)

In addition to making mistakes, ridiculous things happen to us. Some so ridiculous, they’re difficult to believe. I also think it’s important to be reminded that we’re human. Just because we’ve gone through nursing school doesn’t mean we don’t get scared, anxious, angry, or upset. We’re expected to deal with things as they arise with professionalism and grace, however on the inside we may be terrified or freaking out. And that’s okay. We’ve all been there.

I wrote this next section to let you know that you’re not alone. It’s okay to have emotions. It’s okay to be scared, tired, frustrated angry, or embarrassed. I’ve been there. I’ve walked through it, and it does get better.

So, if it makes you feel any better…

I had those mini panic attacks before work.

I freaked out every time I had to call a doctor.

I cried in the bathroom the first time a doctor yelled at me.

I cried after a terrible day in the car on the way home.

I called a patient’s wife his mother.

I took report on the wrong patient.

I had to admit a med error to an attending physician and four of her residents. (It was minor with no ill-effects, but still embarrassing nonetheless.)

I stood at the door and watched a patient and his mother scream at each other because I was too terrified to do anything about it.

A patient call 911 on me. She was admitted for cholecysitis and confusion, so whenever she would eat anything she would be in terrible pain but forget that the food caused the pain. We did not allow her food or drink on admission and started IV fluids. She later called 911 from her hospital bed and told them we were starving her and didn’t remember the many conversations we had.

I had to implement and order for “scrotal elevation” on a man with a “scrotum the size of a soccer ball.”

I’ve had to digitally disimpact way more patients than I’d like to admit.

I asked a patient with bilateral above the knee amputations where her socks were. (I swear I had no idea. She had a blanket on…)

I spent an hour doing a complex dressing change just to have the physician come by and rip it off and not tell me.

I’ve had to dig feces out from under a patient’s nails.

I stayed late because I hadn’t charted a word until 1930…and I ended up leaving at 2100.

I was terrified when I floated the first time, but it wasn’t so bad.

I froze during my first code.

I had to change my scrubs after my confused patient pooped so much that he created a “poop slide” and slid down and out of the bed and hit the floor. Actually, three of us had to change our scrubs.

I called my mom after every shift to tell her all the gross and cool things I’d done from my first nursing clinical to … yesterday. (Being HIPAA compliant, of course!)

I survived a shift off of saltines, peanut butter, and ginger ale because I didn’t have time to stop.

I’ve lost it at the nurse’s station multiple times when a patient who was on death’s door walked back onto the unit a month later just to to tell us ‘thank you’.

I wasted a lot of time doing patient care and getting behind on my charting, because I was too scared to delegate to the tech playing on her phone.

I had to get respectfully assertive with a patient who called me stupid and put her finger in my face.

I brought a patient in to see his father with dementia, and after an hour his sister walked by the room and saw him talking to the wrong man. The son insisted it was his father until his sister walked him to the room next to him and showed him his actual father. And this was after the patient’s “son” convinced him to let us do a test we had been trying to get done all morning.

I sprayed tube-feeding residual all over myself, and my patient, because I forgot to flip the stopcock.

I felt anxious every day before work, but with each shift it got better.

I accidentally pulled out a patient’s external pacing wire before it was indicated when he was standing up from the recliner.

I’m still not the best IV starter in the unit years later, but there’s more to nursing than that.

I still ask questions every single day.

Being in charge of someone’s care for 12 hours at a time can be scary. But as you walk through various experiences, you become more confident. I think it’s important to know that you’re not alone in this journey. Even if people pretend like they’re fine after something scary happens or they’re not mad or sad when someone was just really demeaning to them, it still affects us. Being aware of that within each other can help us to better support one another as we’re growing into awesome nurses. So ask for help or support when you are in need and be there for others when they’re going through something as well. We’re all on the same team!

Every nurse has these stories. We all screw up and figure out how to do things better the next time. Your first few years are full of these moments that eventually turn into hilarious, heartbreaking, empowering, or frustrating stories. One of my more hilarious stories from my beginnings that I look back to with laughter and frustration was when I got poop on my face.

Yes, you read that right.

The New Nurse, the New CNA, the Traumatic Brain Injury Patient, and the Poop that Touched My Face

After a certain amount of time on your unit, you won’t be the most inexperienced person anymore. New people will start to work, and suddenly they will be coming to you for advice. It’s quite an eerie feeling.

It was one of those first few shifts where people were coming to me for advice. At this point, I still felt everyone knew more than me. One of my patients was a younger guy (around 40) who was in a car accident a few weeks ago. He was sitting at a stoplight and someone hit him. Among multiple fractures, he had a traumatic brain injury. This made him completely not himself. He could no longer care for himself. He needed to be turned, bathed, and fed. It was truly heart breaking to see him like that while his wife looked at him helplessly.

At this point, he had been in the hospital for approximately two weeks. He had to have multiple surgeries to repair his various fractures, and they were waiting on an inpatient rehab bed. Due to multiple rounds of general anesthesia and intermittent pain medication, this man had not had a bowel movement since before his accident two weeks prior.

His wife came to the nurse’s station to let me know that she thought he had gone to the bathroom. I gathered supplies and asked a CNA to help me. I’d seen this CNA a few times before, and, being new myself, I just assumed she had much more experience with cleaning and changing people. Oh, how wrong I was.

The man was on contact isolation so every time we went into his room, we had to wear a gown and gloves. Prior to going in, I gathered all supplies, gowned up, and double-gloved.

Typically when we do poopy bed changes, I ask the family to step out. I do this just because it gets pretty gross and most people can’t handle it. I really don’t want to have to deal with being dirty and have a family member pass out or throw up. I’ve got enough patients; I don’t need another one!

However, this patient’s wife insisted on staying in the room. When people insist, I don’t push back. I completely understand not wanting to leave your husband’s side.

We had everything we needed and got started. With each of us on one side of his bed, we held him up on his side, toward my CNA.

Now, keep in mind that this man had not defecated in about two weeks. We had officially opened the floodgates and there was a countywide flash flood alert. There was such an exorbitant amount of stool that it pooled in the bed under him.

So, we were in our contact isolation gowns that cause any person, whether they are holding up a 200lb man or not, to immediately start sweating. Honestly, I probably should start working out in those things because minimal movements produce significant perspiration.

After about five minutes of inefficiently cleaning (give me a break, I was still new!), beads of sweat were pouring down my face. I had already gone through both gloves and double-gloved again. Unable to bear more sweat getting into my eyes and clouding my contacts, I inspected my gloves and gowned sleeve. My gloves were new and my gown hadn’t touched the patient at all. I thought I was good. I thought I was safe. I couldn’t bear it any longer, so I wiped my forehead with my sleeve.

I immediately felt something across my face that did not feel like the gown.

“Oh my God! Is it on my face?! Did I get it on my face!?” I frantically asked the tech standing across from me, forgetting the patient’s wife was in the room.

“No, no you’re good,” she said as she closely inspected my face.

Feeling relieved, I continued cleaning.

After struggling through the rest of the bed change, I ran to the bathroom to look in the mirror. I know she said I was okay, but I just didn’t believe her.

And there it was. A poop stripe was on my right cheek, just inches from my eye, like eye black on a football player’s face.

I immediately grabbed soap and water and scrubbed it off my face. I topped it off with a few deep scrubs from a handful of alcohol swabs to insure optimal cleanliness.

Too embarrassed to admit it to my coworkers at the nurse’s station, I just told them about how much poop there was… not that any physically came into contact with my face. As I was talking, one of them pointed at my shoulder and said in a disgusted voice, “What is that? Is that stool?”

I looked down and there it was…another stripe of stool on my shoulder.

Never getting bodily fluids on my scrubs before, I didn’t know what to do. Like a frantic child, I looked to the more experienced nurses for my next step. “What do I do!? I don’t have another scrub top here!”

“Call the OR,” they all said in unison, with grossed-out looks on all of their faces. (When a group of nurses is grossed-out, you KNOW it’s bad.) Most hospitals have a plethora of scrubs that you can wear, should yours become compromised. Typically, it’s the operating room/surgical services department because they have to wear in-house scrubs in their department. They’re always ill fitting, and you look like a big blue blob. They’re not ideal but they’re better than poop scrubs.

And so for the first time, I called down to the OR to get a replacement set of scrubs. For those of you who aren’t nurses, the first time that you have to get a new set of scrubs because someone crapped, peed, puked, or bled on you is one of those nursing-initiation things. Kind of like the first time you resuscitate someone after a code, or the first time you get an awesome IV on a confused patient, or the first time you do CPR.

Again, welcome to the wonderful world of nursing.