I love genuine questions and people putting in the effort to love and understand each other better. If you come at me just wanting to argue I’m going to troll you back. FAFO.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • oh yeah should have said it’s a nom not a full, one nurse at our hospital won one for changing the side a patient’s IV was on (in fairness that nurse is generally a sweetheart), but I’ve never seen a psych nurse actually win. Apparently at my last hospital the psych unit got the most actually but I think it was because people would hand them to the euphorically happy manics to keep them busy. I would usually hand them out to say a “special thank you” to their nurse because I figured on the off-chance they weren’t trying to slip the nurse their number or draw her a picture of their penis it would be nice. In retrospect maybe that’s why the committee ignored most of them though.


  • As a psych nurse who’s worked a unit with door alarms, somebody is going to have an aneurysm if they have to reset that alarm one. more. GOTDAMN MOTHER-FUCKING TIME.

    Ours were specifically between the top of the door and the frame to keep people from anchoring a noose there. But that also meant they went off any time somebody finished toweling off out of the shower and threw the towel over, every time somebody grabbed the top of the door frame to stretch, and every time somebody was just mad about something at 2am and wanted all the other patients to suffer too. And you had to walk down to the relevant room and use your key in the little panel next to the door. Every. Single. Time.

    So fun fact, there’s actually a academically researched phenomenon called “clinical alarm fatigue” where people get so used to turning alarms off that they stop checking before dismissing them. It’s like when you play a heavily modded game (mine was morrowind) and keep skipping through bogus warnings about missing textures and whatever but while you’re spamming the enter key a real one pops up and the whole thing crashes. It’s part of how radonda vaught killed that lady. Many of the alarms she overrode that day were warnings the nurses routinely had to override to complete daily tasks.

    Anyway that’s the story of how the one time somebody did actually try to hang themselves the staff members turned off the alarm, assured the patient it was a false one, and walked away.

    spoiler

    The reason I know this is because fortunately, instead of trying a different way, the patient eventually brought out the noose they had hastily jammed under the mattress and showed the day nurse, so I was able to be told this story in evening report instead of the health systems quarterly sentinel event PowerPoint. I have a Daisy from that patient for the talk we had that night actually, it’s one of two I’ve kept (there’s a lot that are just inappropriate in one way or another, although admin filters out the really bad ones). Kid wound up in the hospital because he got outed in fall semester and his family told him not to come come for Christmas. We typically had at least a few “homeless for the holidays” every year.




  • I was gonna say, women have been getting sick of men and turning into bog witches for centuries now, probably longer. The more socially acceptable version was nunneries for a while, since men need to feel like they’re in control of that some way or another. I’m the city apartment version where I’m becoming a night shift vampire /other undead into tarot cards and Gnosticism.





  • I began my psychiatric nursing career working as a behavioral technician on a unit for criminally insane men. I worked there for two years and was even promoted to lead tech in charge of making the assignments for all the technicians for the shift.

    Other shifts and other units were sending staff members to the ER at least every few months related to aggressive incidents. Not us. Only thing was a guy had a stroke near when I was starting and while I think the job did do it to him, I think it happened over the many years before I worked there.

    Two months before I left I sustained the worst injury I ever did at that job taking care of criminally insane men …I shut my own finger in a door.

    I was rushing too much while grabbing hygiene / shower supplies for a guy one morning. Big heavy solid wood heavy latch and hinge with a long metal strike plate running top to bottom psych ward door. The tip of my finger swelled up twice as big, the nail turned black and eventually popped off. Looked weird as shit for a few months.

    Meanwhile one time I was helping separate two guys where one was trying to bite the other guys face off and I kinda blacked out for most of it but I do remember seeing the other guys jaw working trying to gnaw at the guy I was holding. Anyway apparently there was a point where I was under both of them on the floor because like three people came into the restraint room while I was with face-bitey to ask how I was and as the adrenaline wore off it turned out I was a little scuffed up and bruised up…

    But holy shit did shutting my finger in that door hurt so damn bad I legit thought I was going to lose the finger and it took over a month to heal!


  • Am an RN.

    1. When you elevate the head of your bed (In this case to help the fluid drain out of your head / sinuses), don’t put the extra pillows under your head, put them under the mattress. you’ll fall to the side as the pillow pile collapses too much to be useful while you’re half awake, but if the whole head is up you just gotta wiggle your way back up if you wake up congested. You can also stuff extra blankets and stuffed animals or whatever else you have under there for extra lift (although at a certain point if you don’t have a footboard the mattress will start sliding down. You could also try sleeping in a recliner chair if you have one.

    2. All fluid used in a neti-pot MUST be sterile, or you’ll get brain worms / amoebas. You can get sterile saline from the wound care / bandage aisle in the pharmacy, or you can make it at home but make sure you let the solution cool so that it is NOT boiling before putting it in the neti pot.

    3. Traditional Medicinals Throat Coat with slippery elm is the GOAT for sore and scratchy throats, which can happen as the fluid drains.

    Also did you take real sudafed or fake sudafed? Phenylephrine is literally a placebo. Pseudoephedrine is the stuff you want but you may need to show ID for it because it can be used to make meth.



  • (Can’t watch right this second but assuming this is the same short story I read years ago) this is the only afterlife I’m willing to believe in. Either this or a combination of this and the gnostic afterlife where we’re all splittable and recombinable parts of one larger soul.

    I forget why, but I strongly associate this concept with the time I passed out from dehydration at work for like 30 seconds and I remember was walking on a pebbled beach and talking to someone. Don’t remember who or what we talked about though.