medicinal laughter--first installment

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Today at work was stressful. The more frazzled I get, the more likely I am to lose my temper (there is a strong, well-established correlation for that...). Thankfully, laughter saved me. So here are some of my most appropriate, non-morbid, funny nursing experiences.

One of my patients was about to be discharged, but he still had a PICC (basically, a bigger IV that places the medications and fluids in the bigger blood vessels near the heart) that needed to be removed. A specially-trained nurse has to take it out, and I needed an order from the doctor for PICC removal by this IV team nurse. So I paged the doctor, told her what I needed, and waited for the order to show up in the computer. When it did, I laughed, showed my co-workers, and laughed again. The order said "make the PICC line go away by removing it from the patient." Some of us speculated that she had wanted us to abra-kadabra it away--POOF.

As my unit is primarily a post-surgical unit, most of my patients have pain pumps either through their IV or into the epidural space (yes, epidurals are for men too). Sometimes the pain medicine is too little, sometimes too much, and the doctors will adjust the doses accordingly. I had a patient who was really drowsy, so I asked for a lower pain medicine dose in the patient's epidural, and then got him to get up and walking, because that is the easiest path to recovery. Now there is this machine that helps prevent blood clots in the legs by squeezing the calves to push the blood back to the heart; it's called a Sequential Compression Device, or SCD for short. As I was helping this patient to get up and walk, I noticed that he was still wearing his SCD stockings. It's easier to walk without wraps on your calves, so I said, "Hang on, you still have your SCDs." He, in the most innocent, drugged-up sort of way, asked "Where did I get STDs?" Not from me.

So now I'm going to go for that second cure in the Irish proverb, and sleep...

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