The Horror
I've seen some pretty nasty things happen to people over the years. Severed limbs, faces blown off with shotguns, electrocutions and other terrible burns, drownings, and plenty of deforming injuries, to name a few. The adrenaline rush tends to overpower the horror I might otherwise naturally feel about those situations.For me, personally, the active lower gastrointestinal bleed is a completely different matter. I hate stool, particularly when it's someone else's stool and especially when it's bloody. I'll take the liberty of speaking for my colleagues by suggesting that the second worst package we can be given in the ER is the dreaded stool sample, brought from home.
"It's over there," said my patient Deborah Peel as she gestured toward the innocent-looking bag on the table. On a better day, that bag might contain her prescription bottles or maybe some test results from the clinic. But not this time.
The temptation was to just ignore it or dispose of it without even investigating the contents, but I felt obligated to look. So after gloving up and taking a deep breath, I carefully approached the package.
Now I've been spit on, puked on, coughed on, farted on, and miscarried on without it bothering me much at all. I keep an extra set of scrubs handy for just those occasions. But nothing could have prepared me for what was about to happen next.
Deborah Peel had thoughtfully collected her stool sample in a Tupperware container, and she even double-bagged it with plastic grocery sacks. Unfortunately, as I picked up the package to get a closer look, I discovered the reason she had double-bagged. The bloody watery diarrhea had leaked from the unsecured container and filled the inner bag. About a liter's worth, I would guess.
As soon as I picked it up, the foul contents poured down the front of the cabinets, soiling the tongue blades, alcohol pads, and cotton-tipped swabs in the top drawer, contaminating the towels in the next drawer, and even making its way onto the bedpans in the bottom drawer. Hey man, nice shot.
My scrub pants and shoes? You don't even want to know.
posted by scalpel at 3:28 AM
20 Comments:
If that's the second worst package to be given by a patient, what's the worst?
Well thanks for the song link;) I love that song:)
BUT that is not the worse thing to see, IMO being an owner of several rescue animals, WORMS top that I think:) But at least they don't smell;)
One of my friends is a doctor's wife, and she tells me about the gross things y'all bring home on the scrubs. And shoes.
EWWWW EWWW and EWWW !!!! I don't care if that package she brought you was wrapped in 24K Gold !! I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole!!! that is just the nastiest story I have read on here scalpel!!! I feel for you ,I really doo !!!! LOL hope you don't have to go thru that again! Hugs, Stac...
I disagree on the active lower GI bleed being the worst. I think the active upper GI bleed with maroon horribly foul stool from one end and vomiting blood from the other.
I think this fear/aversion on my part might stem from the 6am end of the call night admission I got on my first day of internal medicine call during internship--blood and melanotic stool everywhere, he coded and died as we walked into the ICU to admit him.
Horrible.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
omg, how did you function afterwards? i hope you took a bath in bleach!
And that poop smell is one that lingers on...takes a LOT of soap to get it out of your head.
The worst package is a thick envelope from a constable.
If I were you, I'd wear a haz-mat outfit and be done with it. Nothin' sez lovin' like your own air supply and the inability to smell...
How bout faeculant vomiting from a gastro-colonic fistula?
NAAAASTY!
Seriously- I just gagged. Poop is my Antichrist. Any fluid but that. Nothing worse than a gomer taking a big crap in his bed and smelling up the entire ED for the next 2 hours. Makes me want to curl up in the fetal position and suck my thumb. It's funny how the smell of crap in a place it shouldn't be is infinitely worse than any bathroom. Context, I guess...
Scalpel...I know it goes with the territory but...I'm sorry. I give you all so much credit for doing what you do. That just was not a good moment in time. Seriously!
Steve...very funny (the way you put it)and true.
HAHA, that sucks.
I bet the nurses thought twice about wearing crocs after they saw you!
:)
My attempt at oneupmanship.
Wife meets us at the door and says "he's upstairs" so we trek on up. "He" is a naked old dude, upper GI bleed, on his hands and knees in his small bathroom, projectile puking bloody, coffee ground emesis into the toilet while simultaneously projectile pooping bloody, black, tarry stools out his butt and splattering the wall behind him. He begins to wretch and he splatters both the toilet bowl and the wall with his partially digested DNA.
A little peroxide, maybe some Clorox, and a good run through the washing machine and those shoes will be good as new.
So did you do the rest of that shift barefoot??
Oh gross! My son has stomach issues and when he has his trouble (he's on medicine now, thank goodness) it is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen. I had to collect his sample once and scoop it up in different little cups to bring to the lab and before I could do it, I had to soak a bandana in perfume and put it over my mouth and nose first. Even then it was not my most pleasant parent experience! I would not make a good doctor or nurse at all!
Once when I was working in a hospital lab, we had a guy, who was really really sick up on the 7th floor. They didn't know what he had. They sent the floor secretary down with a 72 hour fecal fat, so basically all of his crap for 72 hours. She had it in two large white tubs and someone hadn't secured the lids very well. Unfortunately she left a trail of liquid vomit-smelling stool from the 7th floor all the way to the 1st floor where the lab was. When she carried it in, she set it down on my counter and was rubbing her ungloved fingers together like people do when they want to flick something off. I took one look at her, and said "don't you dare sign my sign-in-sheet. Get yourself over to the sink and wash your hands." She started to argue with me, and I just asked her, do you know that you have feces on your hands? After arguing some more she finally went and washed her hands and then wandered back to her station. I had to call biohazard and have them clean up her snail trail. YUCK! Not to mention that she dribbled it all over my counter, ruined the sign-up clip board and left an awful aroma behind.
I have been persuaded by my wife to wear clogs in the operating theatre, as she reckons they can be easily washed. A downside is that when a patient vomits on induction of anaesthesia (as occasionally happens), the vomit sometimes goes through the holes in the crocs onto your feet. A most unpleasant experience!
I feel like I have to disinfect my computer screen now.
Perhaps even worse is getting a patient to come into the pharmacy and bring the tupperware with feces in it to the counter and ask for the pharmacist. I've seen a woman do that and ask the pharmacist to search through and see if she had tapeworms or other parasites. I've also had a geriatric patient come into the pharmacy and ask if he should re-swallow a pill that appeared in his stools. It was one of the dosage forms that the active drug leaches out and you're left with a "ghost pill/capsule" in the stools. The guy brought it to us in a baggy and it was still covered in stools when he asked about re-swallowing it.
The only other nasty thing's I've seen are leaking diapers on the counter (big bottle of bleach used to clean that one along with a mask, thick gloves, and alot of paper towels.) and the scary "what do think this is" rash someone comes to the counter to ask the pharmacist to see if they should treat it. It's not bad if it's an attractive young woman, but not when its an obese eldery woman who smells like a manure pile.
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