oh the crazy people

For anybody reading, I work in a major hospital in NYC. Understandably in the health care field you see a wide range of characters. Many are normal, average people who end up in the hospital and on any given assignment I have neutral feelings towards. Some are fun to have on your assignment and you are glad they are yours. They make the night. Others try your patience and test your will. Some are downright funny, for reasons they may not even know. On the whole though the average night is pretty balanced between what you could say is an normal pt. and the occasional interactions with one who is "out there".

One such incident happened the other night. A fellow staff member had a spanish speaking only pt. In the middle of the night said coworker went to check on the patient after his monitor leads came off. Two minutes later they were off again and off again was their nurse to put them back on leaving the nursing station with an audible sigh (provoking a laugh from me. If you can't laugh at quirky people who take of monitors, are rambunctious and otherwise are "trouble makers" you'll go crazy and get frustrated).

With a quickened stride comes back my coworker asking for help, I ask what's up and says "i've never seen so much blood" which got me into that room a little quicker. Our patient had pulled out or lost his IV access and started to bleed everywhere. They got up outta bed and walked to the bathroom and walked all the way back to his bed by the window. Never calling for help, never making any noise.

I had never seen blood like that either, you couldn't walk into the room with out stepping in blood unless you were a ballerina. The bathroom looked like a murder scene, toilet, sink and floor had blood all over. Even the walls were blood streaked. I;m not sure what the hell this guy was doing. After making sure the patient had stopped bleeding and was ok I just had to laugh. What a crazy guy! And with my coworker trying to figure out what happened in spanish only made me laugh harder. The patient wasn't confused, oriented to person, place and time but didn't grasp the concept of the IV and why he needed to be hooked up to his fluids. He had blood all over himself so after helping to get him cleaned up I could go back to my charting.

I like to keep things light at work, very rarely do I get truly frustrated and stressed at work. I think I was truly aggravated at work maybe 2-3 months ago. Its incidents like these that define how you approach and react to situations at work. People can flip out and be super annoyed with the pt. for the whole night and let it dampen the whole shift. Or you can have your moment to be upset and annoyed with the creation of excess work and move on. Do what you need to do and get things done.