A Pukey Night

There was vomit in the sink, so I called housekeeping. I figured cleaning it was their job. I was wrong. Removing the chunks from the sink, according to them, is a nursing job. They would clean only the liquid stuff in the sink.

I wasn't happy about it, but I put on some gloves and scooped out the solids, being careful to leave the liquid behind. I wanted to make sure that they had something to clean too.

It's amazing how complicated things can be. Something as simple as vomit in a sink requires two separate departments in a hospital to clean it. I don't mind cleaning vomit off a patient, that's part of caring for patients, but why are they making registered nurses clean the sinks?

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The patient's urinal container was filled with brown liquid. My first thought was that he was bleeding from his penis. Approaching with caution, I saw chunks in it. That definitely didn't come from his penis. That left either his mouth or anus as the orifices of origin. A sniff proved it to be vomit.

Getting vomit in that narrow necked bottle must have been a challenge. He must have put his mouth around it like a bottle of beer. I appreciate the effort he made. It saved us the trouble of cleaning him up, but there is just one thing that bothers me. His penis had been inside that same bottle neck earlier. Isn't that just wrong?