Thursday, March 5, 2009

TMI Thursday: Digitally Unimpact

Heeeelllloooooo my fellow blogger friends! (yes... the caffiene has kicked in BIG TIME!) It's that wonderful day of the week again where we all get to share a horrific yet hilarious story about ourselves pursuing the ability to make people laugh, say "OH MY GOD!!!", or even "WTF!?!?"... you chose your reaction... So thanks to LiLu, I now follow the leader here :-)


(And I swear this is the last "poop" story I write for awhile... what can I say? I'm full of poop stories... and probably poop too... we all are you know :-)


As most of you may or may not know, I am a nurse. An actual RN... I know, coulda fooled ya right?


Now if you ever talk to a nurse, we have AMAZING stories that can be told... HOWEVER, with HIPPA in place, I have to tell this story in a round about fashion and change names...


I started my career as a Surgical Specialty Nurse... which means we were the biggest floor in the hospital and took ANY type of patient regardless of history. If they might be going to surgery, have all ready gone, or went to surgery a long time ago and are back with problems... we took them all.


And as a new nurse... you definintly get the shaft.


You get the patients that are hard to care for and that need special attention...


As in quadriplegics.... that are CONSTIPATED.


I swear... let's call him BOB.


Now Bob was great. Good person with a good attitude and amazing wife.


But Bob had ONE problem... he really needed to poop.


Now being the ever resourceful nurse that I am, I tried EVERYTHING. I tried suppositories, Milk of Mag, small amounts of Go Lytely (which if you have ever taken this stuff... you really don't go lightly), I even tried physical therapy on the legs to stimulate this much needed bowel movement.


Nothing worked.

After about 6 hours... this bitchy and conniving wonderful charge nurse who acts as my boss comes down to tell me that we need to move onto the next step....

"Dana, you need to go in there and digitally unimpact Bob."

"What? What's that?" (I'm totally pulling a blank here... do I need a digital thermometer? Should I take a special instrument in with me to stick in his boom boom? I'm totally new here really, and I swear I must have missed this terminology in nursing school????)

I look up to see her hold up a tube of lube and two fingers.




Oh Shit. Literally.



Now I have never done this before. I have never stuck my fingers into someone's boom boom hole and removed stool. And yet.... apparently this was the task at hand....



So as not to be a pussy nurse... I grabbed that lube and took me and my two fingers into that room. As soon as I walked in the room (out of sight of the other nurses) I let out a huge sigh of relief and stood there for about 10 minutes trying to remember how the fuck I was to do this task...

The wife must have noticed my hesitation and asked me if I had ever done this before... hellz no! (I was much more polite to her of course) She took amazing pity on me and volunteered to show me how it was done (ok... one, why am I doing this if you do it all the time? and two, thank you from the bottom of my feet for doing this for me!)
So on that wonderful night, I was schooled. I got to stand in the room and watch the lubed up two fingers dig around in the glory hole and observe the outcome....
Have a great day! And remember... nurses are the shit!

9 comments:

rachaelgking said...

HA oh my lord! Too funny/gross! Which makes it a PERFECT TMI. Well done, my love.

Anonymous said...

Yea, about that, I worked trauma for 8 years. Poop smell is my kryptonite! I will pass the hell out. No joke.

Had a OD girl that was given activated charcoal during the day shift and it came out as I was taking her to ICU. Yep, they had to pick my big ass off the floor.

FoggyDew said...

I'm a healthcare tech writer and it wasn't until about two years in, and after writing it many many times, I realized a "digital rectal exam" had nothing to do with electronics. I wonder how many guys go into this expecting to see some type of x-ray machine before getting the back end of the shocker?

-jd said...

I've heard this story before, but this time you really did a doozie on telling it...yep that's throw up in my mouth. You nasty!

YanniFan said...

i think your story is a bunch of crap!

just kidding!.......well.....maybe not.......have u ever had the opposite problem as a nurse; that is, had to clean a massive overflow of , er put it nicely....skitters??

ChiTown Girl said...

um...eeewwww!

Tired Future Nurse said...

I'm in school for nursing and about six months ago I observed/ a wife do the same thing for her parapalegic husband. Oy, the poo stories we could share

Nina said...
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Nina said...
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