Hilarious Happenstances involving AIR

In all honesty, nursing is quite serious. More often than not, we have our serious faces on and we are quickly and aptly jumping from one task to another, making sure that our patients are okay, everyone is safe, we’re doing everything we can to make sure everyone is on one page, etcetcetc. You get my drift. But, there is always time and space for a mishap. Now if you know me personally, I am not above tripping on air, running into the door frame, or accessing an embarrassing repertoire of Freudian slips. Yes, a major screw up can ultimately cause or lead to death, unless the celestial discharge occurs naturally. Hence, nurses and any medical worker for that matter, have a sense of humor that many people cannot level with, handle or fathom. We look crazy oftentimes in the eyes of the general public. This definitely happens when we can’t help the discussion of grimy details in public places or even cause a break in a romantic conversation to tell this hilarious story when someone farted in our face. I can say with every bit of my heart that we have the most interesting jobs on the planet, and that I would rather spend time with some of my coworkers than others who cannot particularly grip my morbid and often cynical sense of humor.

Please believe that I always operate under the notion of hope and faith. But, I am the same as my likenesses: a total cluster of sane, insane, jokester, with an immense sense of self and my belief systems. Without further ado, I would love to share my own and some other hilarious mishaps that have occurred in my realm that is the World of Nursing. Here is a selection of some of my mini tales.

HOLY HUMIDIFIERS!

In preparing to set up a room for a surgical admit that is fresh out of the Post-Anesthesia Care Unit, nurses are aware of a number of things that are expected to be arranged prior to the sleepy-head’s arrival. To walk you through a brief synopsis of details that I’m sure you could care less about, you must: #1) have the dynamap set up for post-op vitals (this is the machine that takes your blood pressure, measures  your heart rate, and obtains your body’s oxygen saturation in your blood—to make sure you’re breathing enough to LIVE), #2) prepare oxygen tubing for your arrival, because no matter how hard you try, you don’t normally breathe as appropriately straight out of surgery (the lovely meds that we give you that cause sleepy time and amnesia don’t particularly encourage that medulla oblongata to remind you to take nice healthy deep breaths on the regular—no lie), #3) tissues, barf bucket, etcetc are all within reach so when you arrive you hopefully don’t ruin our scrub choice for that day. Regardless of the rest of the details, you come up to a medical-surgical unit and immediately become attached to a multitude of machines that beep, sing, hum and administer medications. Gotta love technology.

It is in the nurse’s best interest to collect and prep all of these things prior to the snoring patient’s presence to decrease frantic chicken with its head cut off performance at their arrival. As many may know, hospital air is terribly dry. It normally stinks, it’s loud, stale and VERY VERY dry. So in prepping this room, my friend thought that it would be a great idea to provide humidified oxygen, instead of plain O2 (that’s oxygen in cooler typed form my friends). NOW! To prepare humidified oxygen, you need to assemble a few more things. (Half the battle of nursing is assembling—mostly your sanity, but that’s beside the point).Basically you need this oddly shaped canister that has water in it. This canister has two hook-ups. One hook up clings to the wall to obtain the O2 that comes out of the wall, the other port is a sort of spout (like a teapot) that you connect the oxygen tubing to that goes to the patient. This fantastically closed port system provides humidified air that it is that much easier to breathe, and in turn doesn’t create snot blockage.

Please understand that for this system to work properly you HAVE to OPEN the canister at BOTH ends. This is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT because if you only open the one port that obtains the air, and not the second port.. Well, the canister will fill with air and it becomes compressed. Very. Tight. Squeeze. This will further lead to a teapot effect.

It didn’t ring a bell sometimes that my friend made this mistake. It didn’t occur until a loud train like whistling sound filled the room. And of course! He looked around, worried about the arrival of this impending train, with no tracks in sight. Seriously?! What the heck?! Then the bubbling sound brought him back to Earth. Realization hit. He had booby-trapped the patient’s room with a bubbling canister of sterile water. Here was the catch-22. If you open the second port, water and air will shoot out.. What’s the next best thing?

PULL  IT FROM THE WALL!

That would stop the whistling and compressing even more air in that tiny little plastic piece.

So, what does he do?

Rip the apparatus from the wall-- Ah, peace and quiet.

NOT!

He’s just built up enough pressure to power wash the entire hospital’s windows. As the truth sinks in deeper, so does his fear. Oh. My. NO!

Water explodes from the top of the bottle and saturates the fresh bed, walls, floor, and his scrubs. Soaking wet. How in the World can that much water and pressure create such a mess? WHY DIDN’T YOU SET IT UP RIGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE?! His patient is on the way and he just recreated Water World, on the floor and on the walls. What’s the next move? Strip the wet linens off the bed, throw them on the floor, and dance some serious Boogie Nights rip off—scooting across the floor trying to mop up the mess. 

Somehow, by the grace of the heavens above, the water was cleaned up, a new humidified O2 was put in place, a new fresh bed was remade and my friend welcomed a sleeping bear with open arms.  Though no one knew of the shenanigans involved, though all questioned the odd whistling that occurred moments earlier, he was off the hook with only this lovely tale to share at a later date. This story, of which all of you missed out on the acting involved to recreate the amazing scene, was pulled out of the vault to make me laugh on one of those days you have to laugh to keep from crying. And that my friends, is how we make it through. 

CPAP EXPLOSION

I was preparing for prepping my own post-surgical room for a person who needed a CPAP machine to breathe properly. CPAPs are interesting machines, they have a whole face hook-up or just a nose hook-up. When the seal isn’t that great it makes this farting sound. Really funny actually. It’s like this suction-fart sound. It gets louder when people try to talk to you with it on.

CPAPs are hooked up to a massive rolling machine thing that is ALSO hooked up to the oxygen in the wall. I needed to prepare my surgical room as well, pretty quickly, and wheel this machine down the hall to connect in another room. Here comes the fun. To DISCONNECT  the CPAP from the wall you need to pull the whole connector from the oxygen connection. I was in a terrible hurry mind you, so I began to unscrew the tubing from the wall, not thinking my whole process through.

Oxygen is a force to be reckoned with. The air rushing into the CPAP was turned up, basically, as high as the settings could go. I am sure you can guess.. That the CPAP oxygen hose BLEW off the wall entirely and shot across the room. Air rushed into the room, blowing my hair in all directions as I stood there trying to cover the air with my hands. Because that will stop it.

My friend came running into the room, her face was bright pink, worried that something awful had happened. When she arrived she stood there wide-eyed, mouth hanging open, not moving as I stood there, trying to affix the hose to the wall.. And continually getting blown away by hurricane force winds. No joke. Finally the “silence” was broken.

My friend shouted over the rushing air, “WHAT TO DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?!” I looked at her in disbelief, “YOU CAN SHUT THE FREAKING DOOR!” She disappeared momentarily and I could barely hear the door slam. When my friend walked back in she took one look at me, and we both started laughing hysterically.

I fought with the rushing air and affixing the bloody tube for what seemed like an eternity. Somehow, I got it, properly removed the apparatus from the wall, and moved the machine to the other room.

As my friend and I stepped from the room together, breathing heavily, trying to regain composure, another coworker stopped us. She looked entirely distressed. “What’s wrong?” We asked worried, thinking that we had missed something awful as we laughed ourselves silly minutes before. “Did you guys hear the power washing going on? Why would they do that in the middle of the afternoon?! It was SO LOUD! This place is RIDICULOUS!”

As my partner in crime and I rounded the corner, we yet again, exploded into tears. A major win in the middle of a busy day.

Never underestimate the power of laughter… And medical air.