For Better or Worse

An elderly man was given a prep for a colonoscopy. His bowels needed to be empty. The prep was started on the afternoon shift having only limited results, but things changed quite dramatically for the night shift. The old man rang out but before we could respond, his bowels had already emptied. A huge surprise awaited us when we pulled back the top sheet and blanket.

The escaping smell was atrocious. And I have never seen another sight like the one that awaited us. This frail man was lying in the middle of an expansive pool of butterscotch colored bowel movement. The pool wasn’t Olympic in size, but it was quite deep. It covered the entire bed surface from the middle of the man’s back and puddled along both sides of his chest and thighs to forme a lake between his legs. The depth of the feces reached half way up both sides of his abdomen and thighs. We looked at each other in utter disbelief. How could one thin man hold so much feces inside and how could we clean him without getting the mess all over ourselves and on the floor?

We finally rolled him to one side of the bed and allowing the pudding-like consistency of bowel movement to flow into the depression where he had been laying, then by folding the bed pads and sheets over the mess, we could temporarily cover and trap the bowel movement inside. We covered the mess with fresh sheets and clean bed pads. It was useless to try to clean him until we removed the entire mess from the bed. Only when it was removed could we think of beginning to clean the man.

Lining up several garbage cans against the bedside, we pulled the soiled sheets to the edge of the bed and allowed the bowel movement and the blue pads to slide into the waste baskets. Each can was lined with several layers of plastic bags to handle the amount of weight from the excrement. After rolling the man several times and several changes of disposable bed pads we could finally clean the mattress. The worst of the mess was now removed and we could tackle cleaning the man who was placed on more of the dry disposable pads. It wasn’t long until he was clean, smelling fresh, and settled in for the night.

I can’t imagine what the housekeepers thought when they collected the heavy garbage bags in the morning or what the laundry thought, but I know that some of the nurses who helped to clean the man said that they would never eat butterscotch pudding again. Me, it didn’t matter. I never liked butterscotch.