So I haven't added anything in a while, so I figured I'd add a few from my ED experiences.
As I've said before, I see patients come into the emergency department wearing diapers every single day. I sometimes pass the day playing “who is wearing a diaper and who is not”. Most of the time it is boring and just some old people from nursing homes, but every once in a while there is one that is more memorable.
At the last hospital I was working at there was a strange one regarding the young mother (like 28 years old) of a pediatric patient who was acting very weird. She was in a room in with her child, and I was outside of the room. She opened the door and asked for a diaper. “Oh, for your child?” I asked. She replied, “No, it's for me.” I asked her if she wanted a maternity pad, assuming she was on her period, but she replied, “It's a woman thing, you wouldn't understand.” So I figured, fine, whatever, you want to wear our cheap adult diapers, go right ahead, so I gave her one. Later I found another diaper missing from the stack, and a slightly wet diaper in the trash, because I'm a degenerate. Definitely unexpected for her to be so open about it at such a young age.
Another time I had a patient who was a former colleague who had some chronic health issues that forced her to leave, but she had come back to the ED for treatment. She was constantly asking for pain medications and the emergency room doctor refused to give her any, as they had in the past, because it was contributing to her addiction to pain medications. I was tasked with putting an IV in this person, but they were turned away from me at first, and I caught a glimpse of the top of their pull up. She was not that old, so this was a bit of a shock, and definitely not something I would have expected to see in a former colleague.
One last one. I was precepting a new nurse, and we were taking care of a patient who was having complications from high blood sugar from her diabetes. For some reason, she didn't want to get out of the wheelchair she was sitting in, but it wasn't that big of a deal and we could to most of the treatments and tests that we needed to do with her seated in the wheelchair. She had some mobility issues, but mostly got around with a cane, and only was using the wheelchair in the ED for convenience. We were trying to get her into bed and into a gown because we needed to do some test or another, and I was outside of the room but just in earshot. I heard her say to the nurse I was precepting, “I really just want to stay covered up, because I don't want anybody to see that I have to wear a pull up. Please don't tell anyone.” She promised not to tell anyone. I later asked my student what the patient had whispered, and to her credit, she just passed it off and said, oh, it was nothing really.
I guess that's it for now. Anybody else have any interesting sightings?