Oh Crap
It was an unusually busy three to eleven shift on our med/surg. floor. Everyone was “flying solo.” As long as they could do a task without asking for help, they did it. Everyone was trying to get “their own work” done” without pulling someone else away another’s assignment.
One of our nurses Barb was at the desk and answered the call light. It was that old man who said “I really need to go bad!”
It’s almost always a better choice to help a patient to the bathroom than to change the bed linens, although there are a few exceptions. Barb was wearing a brand new pant uniform and shoes. She almost glowed like an angel beneath the fluorescent lights. She was the only nurse at the station. She stopped taking off the doctors’ orders and hurried into the patient’s room.
The man was thin, with wispy white hair. He was unsteady on his feet. Barb helped him to stand then walked behind him to help keep him balanced. She placed a hand beneath each of his armpits to support him as he shuffled to the bathroom. After a few wobbling steps, Barb found herself in a dilemma. The old man began to move his bowels. Like a cow, his feces was loose. It dropped, “PLOP! PLOP!” to the floor splattering Barb’s new shoes and pant legs.
Barb couldn’t allow the shaky elderly patient to walk unaided, but she also didn’t want the poop to continue to splash onto her new clothing. All she could do was to hold onto him and keep going. She kept spreading her legs wider and wider to try to avoid stepping in the feces and to keep her uniform from being splattered.
By the time she made it to the bathroom entrance her stance was almost too wide to go through the bathroom door. She eased the man through the doorway and sat him on the commode. Leaving him with the call bell cord she exited the bathroom, cleaned the mess on the floor, and went to the nurse’s lounge to wipe off the worst of the poop from her shoes and pants. She couldn’t remove enough of the feces from her new pants and had to wear a pairs of operating room scrub pants while soaking her new pants in cold water.
For most of the evening, she was upset, but after a few times of us walking past her with our arms out in front of us with our legs spread wide, she saw the humor of the whole incident and managed to smile by the end of her shift.