A Blood Clot And Two Lunatics

A central line was inserted in a patient earlier in the day, but it was on our shift that all Hell broke loose. Blood was pouring from the insertion site. Pulling off the dressing to try and find the problem and stop the bleeding, I found this thing lying on the patient's skin. It's a blood clot.

I had fun playing with it; it was like a piece of raw liver. (What. You don't like to play with raw liver?) The patient is fine now. It was just one of those things.

Last night near the end of my shift, one of my patients morphed into a raving lunatic. Unfortunately, she was in a room with three other patients. She watched them intently and whenever anyone fell asleep, she screamed, "Wake up. If you go to sleep they will kill you." That went on until 4:30 am, until the meds finally took effect. I had some very sleepy and cranky patients today.

Another patient nearly drove me insane with his OCD. The head of his bed was a few inches from the wall. He wanted it to touch the wall. I unlocked the brakes and moved it. Next, he needed the bed to be square with the walls. I made some adjustments, but they weren't perfect. After a half dozen more tries, he was satisfied that the bed was parallel to the window wall. While locking the brakes, I accidently knocked the bed out of alignment. We had to start over with the alignment process.

Once the bed was perfect, the TV had to be adjusted just so, then it was the IV pole's turn. By this time I had had enough. There was no way I was going to spend my shift moving objects fractions of an inch around the room. I knew the solution to my problem, morphine, and lots of it.

Looking at his medication orders, I knew that they wouldn't nearly do the trick. I called the doctor and got his morphine increased three fold. I went into his room with his dose and he refused to take it. His knee was replaced a few hours earlier, he was in pain, but he was more interested in impressing me with what a tough he-man he was than in getting pain relief. Stupid man! I tried to sweet talk him and explain why he would recover quickly if his pain was better managed, but he decided that he would rather suffer than take the damn morphine so that I he could get some rest. ( Don't people know that morphine is as much for the nurse's benefit as the patient's?)