Results tagged “gross nursing stories” from GGWoo
The fading black cast I've been wearing on my right arm for the last three weeks is finally coming off today. I can admit as a health care professional that I VASTLY underestimated the impact this little surgery to repair some damaged cartilage in my hand would have on me and my day to day life. It was a much more painful recovery then I expected and the having a cast on for four weeks inhibiting simple things like typing, taking a shower, and other more intimate personal time really just annoyed the hell out of me.
Not one to let an opportunity for self-inflicted drama to go by, the impending removal of my cast unburied some old ER nursing days for me way back in the day when I was working at the city hospital in St. Louis. We had a homeless man come in who was wearing about seven pairs of thick cotton socks which probably had not been removed for months if not a year. They'd hardened into a close proximity of a plaster cast which forced us into using the cast saw to cut them off. The whole time the guy kept repeating "don't take 'em off, don't take 'em off" which is what I'd now term a red-flag and worth listening to.
With the sock cut, we literally cracked it open to reveal a foot that had been halfway eaten away by a writhing, slimy ball of maggots. From what we could piece together, the guy must have gotten some kind of wound and had flys on land and lay eggs on it. As bad as it sounds, he's actually pretty lucky because the maggots did exactly what they were suppose to do which eat rotting meat so instead of him developing a deadly case of sepsis and gangrene, the maggots kept his wound cleaned and cleared of debris. There is even a controlled therapeutic intervention for similar problems used in hospitals using maggots.
This is not to say that several of us didn't have to leave the room to puke on the ER floor. I'm just saying nature takes care of itself in strange and unusual ways. Of course he did loose his foot, tool, so that wasn't really great.
So when my cast comes off, I'm hoping I don't have any maggots in there. That is all I'm saying.
