A couple of weeks ago I told you about getting to take care of THE real Colonel Sanders. That got me to thinking about other memorable patients over the years. These are the patients who touched your heart or, in some cases, your funny bone!
One of the funny bone patients was an old sailor many years ago. In those days we still gave a lot of IM Injections instead of giving almost everything by IV as we do today. Of course, from the patient’s perspective, today is much kinder and gentler! To give an injection in the hip (remember the old upper, outer quadrant, folks?) you had to have the patient drop his drawers, assuming of course, he had some on in the first place!
We had one old boy who refused to bare his buns to receive the necessary injection. After giving him lengthy explanations about the importance of getting his medication and so on, he finally and reluctantly agreed to bare the target area. Now, one of the unwritten laws of nursing is you have to cultivate the ability to keep a straight face, no matter what.
He displayed two tattoos on his little, bare butt. There was a propeller blade tattooed on each cheek with “Bombs” on the left and “Away” on the right inscribed tight beneath the blade. Think about that one for a minute! With a big gulp, the nurse administering the injection carried out the medication administration and then rushed out of the room to share the details with the rest of us! It turns out that this old sailor, a WW II vet, ended up in a tattoo parlor after a night of heavy drinking, and some of his “helpful” friends encouraged him to get the afore-mentioned tattoos (and probably paid for them too if the truth be known!).
Then there are the patients that often remain too difficult to talk about, even years after the fact. One of these was a woman in her early forties, dying in our ICU of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease ( or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, if you want the official name). This insidious disease slowly moves up through the body, paralyzing the vital organs and breathing. She knew her time was limited. Her only wish was to make it until her daughter’s graduation from middle school.
Sadly, she didn’t make it. A couple of months after her death one of my fellow nurses was at a local mall and saw her husband and daughter out shopping for a graduation dress. She “lost it,” as we like to say to describe highly emotional moments like this, and darted behind a clothing rack to hide her tears! When she shared this event with the rest of us the next day, we all wept a few tears for a life cut short.
Another patient who has stuck in my memory all these years was a young man with brittle, Type 1 diabetes. This one hit me especially hard because our older son, age 9 at the time, had just been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as well. This patient had a lovely wife and two pre-teen children, both of whom also had Type 1 diabetes. Like my ALS patient, he also did not make it. In those days human gene derived insulin was not available, and treatment often was marginal at best. We even had one old doc who had his patients carry a couple of slices of bread with them at all times in case of an insulin reaction!
Today, doing any kind of CPR has become a much more limited and self-protecting kind of experience. Forty years ago, we did mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compressions. AIDS and Hepatitis B and C had not yet made their nasty appearances. When we got a blood exposure, we quickly checked the patient’s chart to see what the VDRL titer was (an indicator of syphilis). That was also about the time that I learned that hydrogen peroxide was a great remover of blood from fabrics, a trick I use until this day!
I had a patient in ICU who cardiac arrested one night. I was able to bring him back with one-person CPR from a horrid episode of fulminating pulmonary edema. He made it that night and held on for another 3 or 4 weeks and then died. At times like that you have to wonder whether or not you did the right thing. His family was so thankful and appreciative; I hope that extra time helped all of them come to resolution and acceptance. Not too long thereafter, he was put on a ventilator to breathe for him. I was in the room on that fateful afternoon when we turned off the breathing apparatus for the last time. Were those few final weeks worth it? I don’t know, and it was not for me to say!
On a somewhat lighter note, those of us in healthcare know that a recently deceased body can often make strange exhalations and jerky motions as the body begins the inexorable process of decay, and rigor mortis sets in. If things were slow, we often consolidated patients between the ICU and the CCU. On one such night we had moved all the patients down to the CCU, leaving only one recently deceased patient in the ICU, waiting for the funeral home to pick up the body. That evening, the unit housekeeper, a sweet, elderly Afro-American lady, arrived to clean the unit.
Alas, right about that time, the body, which she didn’t even know was lying on one of the beds, gave a mighty gasp and appeared to sit upright in the bed. The poor woman ran hysterically from the unit, hid in a janitor’s closet for several hours, and supposedly never returned to work at the hospital again. I can’t totally verify whether or not she left the hospital for good, but I do know that we never saw her again in our unit!
©2016, The Eclectic Grandma
