Mind
you, I had been a student nurse less than a year. I was sleep deprived, angry
at silly random assignments, and was fuming at having to write a 60-page care
map[1] on an acute care patient who was on 30 medications. Needless to say, waking up at 5 in the morning (yes, I am fully aware people do that every day) left me looking like a zombie that broke into a makeup store and got concealer happy[2] in the darkness of a car
mirror before the sun even decided it was a decent time to rise. I would like
to add that we need not forget the absolute disgrace that occurs in nursing
schools wanting to uphold the “traditional uniform”. White. All white. That is
until the nervous yellowish pit stains present in your always damp underarms.
OR! Until someone poops, pees or pukes on you. NO amount of bleach can EVER
redeem these uniforms. And, being a slightly broke nursing student (who still
works full-time on top of going to school and spending full time in the
hospital) no one wants to purchase another set. It just doesn’t make sense.
Right? Wrong, no one cares about your lack of white laundry concerns. GET TO
CLASS AND CLINICAL ON TIME OR ELSE YOU WILL DIE!
Right, so… With all the important things
covered…
This
story really should account for the terrible occurrence that was the placement
of my first catheter in a human being. Now, let’s have a brief recourse to the
placement of an 18 French[3] catheter in a manikin in
nursing school check-offs. For those of you who have no idea what this means, check-offs were the lovely way that nursing school professors made damn-well-sure that you knew how to do your skills without compromising patient safety as well as sterile technique. But, for all precautionary reasons, were all performed on aptly named manikins with oversized sexual parts, and abnormally large boobs or pectoral muscles. Which, by the way, is ultimately deceiving. Giant accessible parts in school does NOT equal the same in the real world. Heaven forbid the day we all noticed we were slightly screwed and spoiled at the hands of manikin magicians who gave us a false sense of security when it came to some of our lab skills. Forgive the digression, but do try to sympathize. We really are brilliant minds and hands, but do also understand that we had to start somewhere! (Be advised that we are totally capable and grand AND do the dirty work. A-thank-you. Now, back to it..)
Check-offs are terribly stressful. Everyone waits out in the hall with their
freshly laundered uniforms on, awkwardly glancing at their watches every
0.114324 seconds. One by one, the baby nurses get called in to perform their
tasks under one-to-one supervision. A lucky little lady I was to get one of the
COOLEST check-off professors that ever graced the Earth. She shall remain
nameless, but I will disclose I envied her fiery red hair, her extremely saucy
stature, and the fact that she knew EXACTLY who she was.
I
walked in, wringing my hands, if that was even possible, whilst
holding the heaping plastic wrapped box that held the oh-so-intimidating
sterile catheter kit. I happily and almost gaily announced all my nursing
interventions pre-putting a catheter into this plastic person’s “pee-pee hole”.
My professor nodded with a grin, as if she hadn’t heard the same interventions
noted only seconds before, nay, all day, totally verbatim.
I
proceeded with my task at hand. Now, if you’ve ever had a catheter placed, you
may know the inner workings of these creepy little devices (mind you, one of
the leading sources of infection in a hospital—but I digress again). You have
to inflate a little balloon in the catheter to make it stay in place inside a
person’s bladder. This fantastically crafted balloon is inflated with saline,
10 cc to be exact. (By the by, all nurses use the phrase cc because it makes us
feel cool).
It is absolutely within your best interest to test the balloon before putting it into someone. No leaks = a good catheter. Well I checked mine. I checked it like a champ. But once you inflate the bubble, dear friends, you have to DEFLATE the bubble. I had some terrible difficulty with this task. My balloon would be damned if it were to deflate. It shook its little latex fist in my general direction and laughed a diabolical laugh. Well, I wouldn’t let the balloon win, so I drew back on that 10cc syringe as if my life depended on it-- Which, it kind of did, considering that if I failed this check-off I would have to spend a certain amount of days with one-on-one tutorials in placing catheters in Mrs. Perkins (the manikin with uncannily perky ta-tas).
I drew back like Hercules, and sure enough, as you may figure with the amazing ability of physics, the stopper came flying out of the back of the syringe and all of the 10cc of saline flew out at hyper-speed. So fast and so immense my unbelievable strength, I was able to shoot the saline across the room and completely saturate my professor. Yes. I did just that. In my mind, I had ruined her with pee-pee water. Though it was not a real person, nor real parts, nor a real situation, I died three times over as I watched water dripping from my professor’s perfectly hair-sprayed head. How lucky am I?
Lucky.
The
luckiest.
Oh
my goodness how could I get so lucky. Right?
“Jacquie, my dear, let’s pretend that didn’t happen.” Oh. My. HOLY CRAP! I have this beautiful
trait that is known as verbal diarrhea, and this was no relapse, and therefore
my reply was simply, “seriously?” Bless her heart, all my professor could do
was nod with tightly pursed eyes. Good heavens. She was serious!
I did as I was told. I placed that catheter and removed it like no one had ever seen. I somehow, magically passed that check-off, which leads into the rest of this lovely tale…
A 1 liter bottle of Coke has, well, a liter in it! A liter is a LOT of fluid. Now, imagine that you drank an ENTIRE liter of soda and did not pee for 8 straight hours. You would have this lovely mixture of both that bubbly drink and other amazing bodily fluids fighting the good fight to be released from your ever-sensitive kidneys/ureters/urethra/glomeruli. Look that one up you guys. Glomerulus, it will blow your mind!
Of course, I was in a nursing rotation on one of MANY medical/surgical floors and
furthermore in a constant state of butterfly central. These butterflies were in
my stomach, in my bladder, in my chest (these may have been palpitations, but
you should understand if you’ve ever been scared out of your wits). I was
called to the untimely task of placing a Foley catheter. This is not so bad.
BUT! This person had not peed for over a certain number of hours, was getting
IV fluid, and had been eating and drinking the entire time as well. Imagine the water weight just
“hanging out”. My point exactly. Let’s not forget to mention that NO HUMAN
BEING has the same anatomy. Well technically they do, but it does not look the
same. I don’t care how much you weigh, your BMI, none of that. Men are maybe
this lucky, but women, absolutely not! Women are beautiful by the way, I just can't comprehend why our bodies are so bloody confusing. Seriously now. Seriously!
This person was moaning and writhing in bed, not too thrilled to be in this situation. May I please mention with utmost honesty, nor was I. But! My professors had this incredible ability to place me in the most awkward of situations when it came to performing a nursing task for the first time in hospital on a human (living and breathing). In my defense, I assembled a team. It was about 5 people: people holding legs, feet, stomach, what have you so I could… get in “there”. I didn't want to go in blind. But, well folks, blind doesn't even cover it.
I
have decided that in every human being, there is at least one very dark hole;
very, very dark of which there can often be no return. This was one of those
moments.
I
was as sterile as sterile can be. Let me tell you what I saw. Absolutely
NOTHING. I started to panic. There was nothing, nowhere. No holes, no nothing
ohmygoshIaminbetweenthisperson’sthighsandIcan’tfindwheretostickthisslipperytube.
Someone
“thoughtfully” mentioned to “AIM HIGH!” A person I still have yet to determine who
they were, because I would have killed them in that moment and every single second thereafter. By the way, don’t you EVER tell anyone between a person’s legs, trying to place
a catheter, to “aim high.” It’s not a video game of Angry Birds! It is
someone’s private parts and the calamitous search for the hole of “relief”. Be professional people!
Somehow,
by the grace of the nursing gods, I found that hole. The one that
really was…invisible. In a matter of seconds, maybe minutes, but I stand by
seconds, an entire liter of “Coke” emptied into that collection bag. For the
first time in hours, this poor person stopped screaming and writhing in pain.
Their relief was brought on by this magical latex catheter, the ultimate fear
of a nursing student, and the directional expertise of the gods that directed
Columbus in 1492, somewhat straight across the ocean blue. My patient instantly passed out into the deepest sleep of urinary free bliss. What success!
bring a flashlight!
[1] A stupidly long research paper on your patient’s current disease/illness state, the medications they were on, and how you, as a lovely smart nurse may attempt to reconcile these terrible situations with your absolutely picturesque ideals of a totally compliant individual. (Ugh, did someone say compliant?!)
[2] I
thought I did a great job applying that tinted makeup—Until a picture surfaced of me in the
morning pre-clinical. Terrible tragedy, really—and have since been attempting
to find the proper matched concealer since then. Reverse raccoon eyes are NOT attractive, by any means.
[3] An
abnormally large, but not so abnormally large catheter that gets inserted into
your “pee pee hole”, male or female—no one is safe.
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