Get your mind out of the gutter

True story, an order from my patient's chart: "start pleasure feeds diet".

Toys in the attic he is crazy...

But holy shit, I am shaken up by it. I had this guy all night. I feel for the guy, I really do. He's been in the hospital for over half a year. Half. A. Year. I can't even imagine that. Anyway, I kept trying to convince this guy to let me give him a bath. He kept saying no, and I finally reached an agreement with him that I'd give him pain meds beforehand so it would be easier, and he said yes. So I have his bath drawn up (it was absolutely worth negotiations, he was disgusting and needed a bath so, so badly).

I took off his blanket. He sat up in the bed, one hand fervently swinging at me, the other pointing at me. He's so agitated veins are popping out of his forehead.

"you LIE! YOU LIE! YOU LIE!". Ad nauseum. And I'm sitting there floored, because until then this guy has barely even bothered to wake up. I said something like, "Ok, it's going to be all right. I'm sorry you think that". That set him off. "I don't think so, I KNOW SO!" I said, "Ok, fair enough. No bath". And he instantly settled down, laying back on the bed and going back to sleep, like a switch was flipped.

Shit, it shakes me up when people are so freaking fervent, though. I'm as agnostic as they come, and I had the fleeting thought, "oh my god, this must be what people believe the devil looks like" (and maybe this just means I'm a more superstitious agnostic than most). I am not shaken up by deranged patients very often. But this guy has made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Maybe the sudden superhuman strength, the demonic fervor in his eyes, maybe the blood vessels standing out on his forehead?  I don't know what freaked me out, but I am shocked he didn't spin his head around and start spewing pea soup.  I'd have had to get a change of clothes at work.  Ugh.

Happy Halloween! Oh, wait...

Love at first sight

An adorable little old man on lots of pain meds just told me I look and act just like Tina Fey. <3 too bad he's someone else's patient.

running gross interference

So, something (a mass of dried blood and tissue, NOT gross by my standards, but whatever) fell off my friend's patient's foot (follow?).

What does she do?

Yep, she comes and gets me. "can you please, please, please put this in a bag to show the docs later in case they want to see it?". Sigh.
So, I put it in the bag and went back to eating my lunch.

Slow night here. I wish I had more hilarity to Blog...

Double take

One of my patients is a 78 year old woman. We needed to contact her next of kin. There's a form we use to keep that info handy. When I found it, here's what it said:

Relative name: [redacted]
Relationship: Mother


There's the double take. I guess someone filled it out in a hurry, further down on the page in a different color pen and different handwriting, it said:

(the PATIENT is their mother)

Good thing that was on there, I wonder who made the awkward phone call to necessitate that footnote.