One of the things people most often ask me when they learn I'm an ER nurse, is "What's the strangest thing you've ever seen?"
Oh, where to begin.
I'll recount a few of the more notable. These aren't made up, though it's hard to believe there are people this dumb in the world.
Case 1:
Just don't lie about how it got there. A thirty-something gentleman came in one evening with a chief complaint of abdominal pain. The story he recounted to the triage nurse: He woke up this morning and noticed blood in his stool. He was trying to examine himself with a mirror and
a full-size aqua-net can...and wouldn't ya know it, the can "subsequently became a rectal foreign body." The x-ray was fairly impressive.
Case 2:
It'll be better by morning... A teenage kid was brought in, mortified, one Sunday morning, with an interesting surgical complaint. Turns out he'd been bored and lonely, and a little frisky the previous night, and had noticed with gleam in his eye the hole in the middle of a 25-lb barbell weight in his room. Blood flow patterns being how they are, he soon found the weight impossible to get off (pun intended). It was late, and he figured if he went to sleep, things would be back to normal in the morning. Wrong. My friend, who works in the OR, told me it took the surgeon a little over two hours to cut through the weight.
Case 3:
Indisputable medical wisdom One night I noticed on-screen a 20-something year old woman with chief complaint
"Rectal Foreign Body." Now that always gets your attention, because there's always a story involved. I jumped into the radiology system to try and find the x-ray, but had no luck (there's an infamous x-ray that finds its way into the breakroom every yuletide season of a Christmas-tree shaped vibrator in somebody's colon). After shift, I asked my friend, the doc who took care of this gal, what the story was... As it turns out, the story was fairly boring, just some bedroom adventure gone awry. But the removal story is where it gets funny. My friend recounted the patient in the pelvic exam room, in the stirrups, trauma surgeon and my friend both working at this toy from different angles under heavy sedation. At the point where the pressure was most intense for the patient, I guess she woke up and shouted "OWWWW, that's my ass!!" to which my friend replied, "Yup, that's what you shoulda said two hours ago!"
Okay, that'll do for round one. To come: interesting penile foreign bodies including, but not limited to: spiral cell phone antenna, ball point pen, open safety pin, and dime. Ouch.
One of the things people most often ask me when they learn I'm an ER nurse, is "What's the strangest thing you've ever seen?"
Oh, where to begin.
I'll recount a few of the more notable. These aren't made up, though it's hard to believe there are people this dumb in the world.
Case 1: Just don't lie about how it got there.
A thirty-something gentleman came in one evening with a chief complaint of abdominal pain. The story he recounted to the triage nurse: He woke up this morning and noticed blood in his stool. He was trying to examine himself with a mirror and a full-size aqua-net can...and wouldn't ya know it, the can "subsequently became a rectal foreign body." The x-ray was fairly impressive.
Case 2: It'll be better by morning...
A teenage kid was brought in, mortified, one Sunday morning, with an interesting surgical complaint. Turns out he'd been bored and lonely, and a little frisky the previous night, and had noticed with gleam in his eye the hole in the middle of a 25-lb barbell weight in his room. Blood flow patterns being how they are, he soon found the weight impossible to get off (pun intended). It was late, and he figured if he went to sleep, things would be back to normal in the morning. Wrong. My friend, who works in the OR, told me it took the surgeon a little over two hours to cut through the weight.
Case 3: Indisputable medical wisdom
One night I noticed on-screen a 20-something year old woman with chief complaint "Rectal Foreign Body." Now that always gets your attention, because there's always a story involved. I jumped into the radiology system to try and find the x-ray, but had no luck (there's an infamous x-ray that finds its way into the breakroom every yuletide season of a Christmas-tree shaped vibrator in somebody's colon). After shift, I asked my friend, the doc who took care of this gal, what the story was... As it turns out, the story was fairly boring, just some bedroom adventure gone awry. But the removal story is where it gets funny. My friend recounted the patient in the pelvic exam room, in the stirrups, trauma surgeon and my friend both working at this toy from different angles under heavy sedation. At the point where the pressure was most intense for the patient, I guess she woke up and shouted "OWWWW, that's my ass!!" to which my friend replied, "Yup, that's what you shoulda said two hours ago!"
Okay, that'll do for round one. To come: interesting penile foreign bodies including, but not limited to: spiral cell phone antenna, ball point pen, open safety pin, and dime. Ouch.