By Jessica Fish, Nursing Student at Wake Technical Community College
Working as a CNA at a hospital is always interesting. Especially, if it’s in the ICU. I have been asked some of the most bizarre things. Seen some of the coolest, if not grossest, things I could have ever imagined. All while still pursuing my nursing degree.
When I think of all the people I have met, I most fondly remember the night I met one of our hospitals respiratory therapists. He introduced himself as he. A nurse and I headed downstairs with a rather sick and unconscious patient to go to the Radiology Department for a CT scan with this respiratory therapists. Our poor nurse was pretty much flying by the seat of her pants, busying herself with this and that and almost pulling her hair out because our woman had a total of ten IV pumps traveling with us, a wound VAC as well as a spike in her head to help relieve intra-cranial pressure. Needless to say she was frantic to get her back upstairs and safely tucked away in her room where she could be monitored securely and safely.
Upon returning to the unit and to our patient’s room we had to do a lot of reorienting of the IV lines, tubes, drains, and monitor cords in order to fit the bed and everything attached through the door. As I was standing at the head of the bed, helping to pull our patient’s bed through the door, I noticed a second too late that we had overlooked one IV line. As I frantically tried to reorient the line, the nervous wreck that was the nurse just wanted her inside and gave a final shove to the bed, effectively getting the patient out of the hallway and also giving me a nice bath as the IV spike quickly exited the bag of IV fluids.
The respiratory therapist, having just met me, did his very best not to laugh but just couldn’t take it and started rolling with laughter. At which point, I became flustered because this gentleman I barely knew was having quite the time at my expense. I spent six hours drying out my scrubs and continued to get giggled at by this man for the rest of the evening.
To this day, when I see him or when he works with our unit, he still chuckles and retells the story to other nurses who might not know it. And in between laughs he tells people I just had the most pitiful facial expression, one that looked as if my cat just died, on my face as it happened and he has never seen anyone look so sad, even those that get worse things than just a little IV fluid on them.
Do you have a funny ER story? We at Scrubadoo would love to post “Your Stories” here on our blog! Just email jen@scrubadoo.com.
