Recently I had a friend move from med surge to the E.R.   My friend loves…Loves..LOVES it. I am an Icu nurse, but I do work in  E. R  at my other job, and I will agree it definitely has it perks. I love her enthusiasm and her spirit its very refreshing, its cute, but then you remember the dark side…the part you dread…the OMG DID THAT JUST HAPPEN part of nursing. The gross side. Here are just a couple off the top of my head

• THE DARK SIDE OF NURSING:  THE GROSS EDITION PART ONE
  • One time I asked someone for help turning a  patient, we turned him and  his butt was facing me and he farting this hot butt breath on me then poop started oozing and oozing like hot lava and got all over my gloves and unfortunately my naked wrists… I wanted to die.
  • One time I was going to give some meds to a patient that came from a long term care facility , so you already know he was covered in cooties. So he had a peg ( a feeding tube that is connected to his stomach, imagine a long rubber hose connected to patient’s tummy) so off course it was clogged.  I threw some coke in there to help unclog it, old nursing trick. Capped it walked away, came back 45 min later when I opened it,  he coughed and it shot out right in my face, so everything that was in his stomach and intestines shot up right in my face , my hair, and I just got my eyelashes done, so clumps of crap was hanging from them, I could see them just dangling,  the smell was horrendous. Contemplated burning my face off…and I wanted to die.
  • One time I had a patient with 3rd and 4th degree burns over 60 % of his body, patient had pseudomonas growing all in his burns. Pseudomonas is a foul smelling bacteria combined with the smell of burnt flesh, by the way actually smells like mesquite and a fresh campfire to me. So long story short he pooped and we had to take the dressing off and we applied  some Dakins (basically bleach) dry dressing and flexinet . Flexinet is like fishnet panty hose, so when I stretched it out to cut it off to change dressing because he was covered in poop and pseudomonas , the first cut  snapped it  back and flung poop..pseudomonas..and yellow sloth (dead infected  skin) in my face and hit my lips…I wanted to die..really.. really wanted to die.
  • One time I had a trauma patient that shot himself in the mouth bullet traveled from the top of the inside of his mouth traveled up through his left check, popped out the left eye and exit through the top of his head, didn’t die.. so I had to suction his mouth very carefully, because even though he was alive he had brain matter falling from the hole in his mouth, so one time I was suctioning and I caused a cough…and it all shot out so fast hit me in the face …after washing my face a billion times an hour later I scratched my ear and I had a small piece of brain matter in my ear… I wanted to die.
  • One time I had a patient that was prisoner in federal custody, the cop watching over him unhooked the right hand so he could pee in a plastic cup , a thing we call a urinal, and when he finished I walked towards him to grab and empty it, he asked me for morphine I told him for the thousand time he couldn’t have any and  he got mad, called me a rat taco eating bitch (I’m Mexican) and threw his urine on me and it hit my hair.. chest and face… I could smell his pungent yellow foul smelling urine the rest of my shift no matter how much I scrubbed everything for the rest of the shift… and I wanted to die…
  • One time I walked in on my patient that rolled up his poop like a tootsie roll and was eating it.
  • One time I had a guy who was in some kind of incident, I forgot why, but he had his butthole surgically closed  up and the surgeon made a hole on the side of his stomach, pulled out a piece of his colon cut it, (made a stoma) and that is where he poops , he changes the bag or empties it when it was full of poop, anyways, he and his partner decided to have sex through it, and it got infected with a STD,  so I had to give antibiotics, but also had to rub the colon (stoma) with medicine in a gel like form on it, and he said it tickled, because he coughed and I got colon ..green gross stuff, and STD all over my pretty pink scrubs and my neck…ugh.. I wanted to die.