Nurses don't get paid enough as is, but female nurses deserve an extra pay bump for some of the horrible things they have to put up with on the job. Below, females who work in the medical field share the worst patient they had to deal with. Content has been edited for clarity.
Please Call An Attendant
“He pooped all over the bed and asked if I like the smell. Then proceeded to explain in explicit detail why he enjoyed it and would likely have another episode that night.
He liked to sleep with it, and it took the ER head nurse and multiple others along with myself to convince him to let us clean it up. (You could smell it from everywhere in the ER, words cannot describe how vile).”
The Persistent Creep
“I work in healthcare. We have one particular patient who was a complete creep.
He started off innocent enough, he was having a procedure on his prostate and called and asked about pre and post op care – and asked about pleasuring himself, and if it was okay to do post procedure. A pretty normal question. No biggie. I answered his questions and hung up. I thought nothing of it.
A few minutes later I had to call down to another staff member about his paperwork; she mentions that she just spoke to him – sure enough, he had called her to ask about pleasuring himself and going on about how he didn’t know how long he could hold off.
Okay, odd, but maybe he wanted a second opinion.
The next day, I’m talking to the girl from his urologist’s office, and she tells me how he kept asking her about pleasuring himself. She got uncomfortable and told him to talk to his male doctor about it, which she mentioned to the doctor after and was shocked to find he didn’t utter a word to the doctor.
So fast forward to his appointment, I meet him – but he doesn’t put two and two together that he spoke to me on the phone, and again asks me about pleasuring himself. Presenting the same questions he has asked at least four women that I know of as if he is asking the first time. I’m repulsed, he is a creep and just wants to talk about jerking it to women. I excuse myself, and he is put out for his procedure.
Sure enough, creepo calls me the next day to talk about it again.”
A Real Keeper, Right Here
“There was a 50 Chaldean male, and I am a 20 something female. I had been a nurse for about a year and a half. It had been an average day; this guy was doing great and getting discharged. The whole morning he was up pacing his room with his dress pants on and no shirt on. Every time I’d enter the room he would start rubbing his very hairy chest and stretch as if trying to show off his chest or shoulders or something. I just got the sense he was trying to come off as assertive or masculine or something. He was not in good shape by any means. He had a big belly of sorts. I was working on a regular medical floor at the time, and he came in with diabetic keto acidosis. Discharge teaching revolved around healthy eating, taking blood glucose, insulin administration. As always I went over instructions/ scripts with him then I always ask if they have any questions. He started asking if diabetes will affect his libido because he feels he has a lot of vigor and would hate to see that gone. I told him that it’s true impotence is a very real complication of uncontrolled blood sugar. But as far any question about his drive he should be sure to bring up to his doctor at his follow up. Before he left, he gave me his business card, and it had his number on it as well. He said to give him a call if I had an needs in his business and if I ever wanted to go out with him. Nothing about this is out of the ordinary yet. Some guys act ridiculous around us all the time. I can’t begin to tell you what a culture shock being a nurse is.
But a day or two after this guy is sent home; I’m randomly in a patient room and my work phone rings. What I answer is to find it’s the guy I had discharged. He called our unit and asked for me. It’s regular practice to just push a call through to the nurse someone asks for. He begins going on and on about his dong and how it’s not as sensitive as it once and when he pushes down on it it turns red and purple. I know there was more he described, but it felt unreal. I interrupted him and asserted that if he felt he had a problem, it was appropriate to see his primary physician and this by no means an appropriate call. Once a patient is discharged it isn’t appropriate to call a nurse about anything let alone something that isn’t even related to the care they were receiving. And especially this topic. Over the next few hours, he called back several times describing his dong in more and more detail. Eventually, I was able to get the unit secretary to catch his number, and she wouldn’t send the calls through. A few days later a different secretary was working and sent the calls through again. He did the same thing describing his dong. I just hung up and this time called my manager and security and wrote up a report about the incident. There were strict standing rules at the front desk that if his number called the call was to be sent directly to security.
It became known as the dong report around the unit. The kicker of it all is that I’m a lesbian and no there is absolute no way he could have known.”
Top Level Creepy
“I had a patient in his 20s with sickle cell anemia and a substance abuse problem. He ended up hospitalized with severe priapism, so his dong was basically like a two-liter bottle in his lap. I was there assisting the doc with draining the blood every few hours as needed.
Prior to round three of the draining procedure, he pulled me close to his bed and said, ‘can you just try to ride it before that guy drains it again? It’ll never be this big again, and it’d be sad to let it go to waste.’
I noped right out of that and had my male colleague take over for the rest of the shift.”
Some Say He’s Still Haunting That Office
“While I was still in dental school, I had a 50-year-old male patient who needed quite a bit of work. At our second appointment together, he bit me (definitely intentionally in retrospect). I got bitten all the time (it’s a hazard of the job), so I made my usual joke about needing to keep my fingers and kept working on his tooth. A minute later he started sucking on my fingers, so I quickly finished up the filling I was working on and let him go for the day before reporting him to the patient coordinator. I got him switched to a male student.
A few weeks later I passed the patient and his new student in the hallway. By the time I saw him coming, it was too late to change direction. The patient made a beeline for me and crossed his arms over his chest and pushed my body up against the wall, whispered ‘miss you,’ and walked away. I was graduating a few weeks later, so I didn’t do anything about it, but he’s probably some other poor little dental student’s problem now.”
He’s Here For The Long Haul
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“I had a male patient poke my chest and go ‘beep boop’ while doing it and then wound up and smacked my butt when I turned around to leave the room.
He thought it was hilarious. It was long-term care, so it’s not like he was leaving anytime soon.”
Pretty Terrible Reasoning
“I had a patient try to grab my butt. I moved out of his reach and told him he couldn’t do that. He demanded, indignantly, to know why not. I told him because it was inappropriate and not allowed. He angrily stated, ‘But I WANT to!’ as if that completely justified it.
I was 19 at the time; he was certainly old enough to know better. “
Stop Asking Questions
“I was about 20 and working as a nursing assistant at a hospital. A guy in his late 40s/50s came in for something relatively routine.
He spilled his urinal in bed. I cleaned him up, and he started needing to pee like every 20 minutes after that. He started saying inappropriate things like, ‘Does your father know what you do for work?’ ‘You like working here?’ ‘Your boyfriend probably doesn’t like this.’
This went on for hours until I told my nurse. She went in, he not only didn’t have any more accidents, but he also didn’t ring the rest of the night.
I’ve dealt with a ton of inappropriate things since then. I’ve been assaulted at work and had things thrown at me and rude comments but none that made me feel sick the way that guy made me feel.”
It’s A Tough Job
“I had a patient on our psych ward one time who was having a psychotic episode, clearly very delusional. I’m a redhead, and thus I have white skin. This guy’s room was across from my desk, and he stood in his doorway making statements about how pale girls got him hard.
Once his behavior escalated, he stepped into the hallway in nothing but a sheet tied around his waist.
He continued to make horrendous remarks about me for the next hour until the sedatives I’d given him kicked in.
There’s something just horrifying about being harassed in front of your colleagues and not being able to do anything about it. That was the longest hour of my life. I felt so humiliated by the end of it, in addition to the fact that I was afraid of this guy; he was much larger than I am.
Most days I don’t take work home with me, but I won’t deny that I angry-cried on my way home that night.”
Nice On The Surface
“One night the cops brought this guy in from a holding cell at the station. He was complaining of respiratory distress, but it was more of a panic attack. At first, I felt bad for him. He was a young guy, and he told me this was the first time he’d ever been in legal trouble, he said he’d gotten high and ‘made a mistake.’ I remember hoping that whatever he’d done wasn’t all that serious as he seemed like a nice kid.
Then I overheard the officers talking outside his room. It turns out he had confessed to assaulting a woman who had been into our ER earlier that day for a SANE exam. I had briefly been her nurse as well, so I knew all the details of what had happened, and it was pretty horrifying.
Having to be nice to him for the last hour of my shift was more draining than the 11 hours that came before it.”
None Of These Chicken And Veggies
“Most of my time in a hospital the men could be a little creepy or the confused ones would do gross things, but the worst was a 20-something Type 1 diabetic guy. He had no mental illness or deficit. He was in the hospital for uncontrolled blood sugar and was throwing a fit because he wanted a hamburger and fries for lunch. I told him that the hospital does not serve that, but if he wanted family/friends to bring food in for him, that was allowed. When lunchtime came, I carried his tray into his room and set it on his table. He took the cover off, and much to his dismay it was a chicken sandwich and vegetables. He asked ‘what is this?’ and as I turned to respond, he chucked the chicken sandwich at my face.
I no longer work in a hospital.”
Just A Casual Meat Cleaver
“I was on a community placement in a reasonably remote area visiting a patient with known mental health issues alongside a qualified nurse. I got to the house, had a nice chat with the gentleman about how he was getting on. He seemed well. We heard a knock at the door; the patient excused himself to answer it. A load of shouting followed and the nurse I was with went to investigate. Approximately five minutes passed, and they both returned.
The patient had chased the visitor down the road with a homemade meat cleaver and had highlighted the fact he had plenty of other weapons in the house. I was pretty glad to leave.”
You Learn To Ignore It
“I’m a nursing assistant. I’ve been asked to dance topless, to dinner, to rub their feet, to strip, to get into bed with them, to marry them, etc. I’ve been offered money to leave my boyfriend and go with these old men who can’t even walk. I’ve been asked by a patient to check for an inguinal hernia (not what he was there for) and to ‘give the old Willy a good tug.’ I’ve been told that he has always wanted to try some white meat, that I will look good in my birthday suit, and one patient was convinced I was his girlfriend and would throw fits if I didn’t sit and eat dinner with him. This is all normal. I’ve been bitten, scratched, cursed at and spit on. I laugh at it now. You have to.
Nothing beats the time I was helping a little old lady to her bedside toilet, and as I lowered her down, she dropped her hands, and full-handed grasped my butt cheeks and squeezed them. There was no escape unless I dropped her. Then she tried to kiss me. I set her on the toilet and pried her off me, then ran.
It turns out the 90-year-old had wanted to ‘experiment’ and thought I was gay. She was waiting for hospice placement and figured her deathbed was the time to find out. I didn’t go into her room again.”
Assault Is Assault
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“When I worked in a nursing home, we had an old man with mild dementia who was well known for getting handsy with any female he came across. One day my boss told me to take him away from the front door so he wouldn’t bother visitors. He was sitting there napping quietly in the sun, bothering nobody. When I woke him up and told him to come with me, he thought I was coming on to him. He started following me around and trying to corner me, touch me. I made a poor decision to sit in a chair, in an attempt to get him to sit in the chair next to me. With my face now at groin height, he took his chance, grabbed my head and smashed my face into his old man privates.
When I told my boss about it, she said it wasn’t assault because he had dementia and refused to report it. She told me I needed to be more resilient and just get over it, these things happen when you’re a nurse.”
Life-Threatening Tales From The Job
“I had a male patient try to strangle me when I was trying to lead him out of the common area because he was urinating all over the floor.
I had another patient, very large German man, he was a foot taller than me and outweighed me by 75 pounds. I was doing my rounds, and I found him in another patient’s room with his pants off and his dong out. The patient was sleeping luckily. I said the German guy’s name, and he whipped around so hard I’m surprised he didn’t fall. And then he started running up to me. I ran out of the room and ran to the dining room. It was the only room (other than a patient’s room) that had doors that closed and locked. I locked the door, and he caught up a few seconds later. This dude starts punching the door and trying to break through the glass. I thought for sure he was going to break the door down.
Luckily he eventually stopped. Then he stared at me through the glass for almost an hour, waiting for me to come out.”
The Oldest Trick In The Book
“An older male patient came in complaining of trouble peeing, so I performed a prostate exam. His prostate felt normal, so I gave him a lab form to test PSA and sent him on his way, no biggie.
Then later that morning one of the female doctors in the practice came to me all ‘oh my god you saw that man today, I should’ve warned you! Was it trouble peeing or rectal bleeding this time?’
It turns out that with every new female doctor in the practice, this guy made sure to get a rectal exam. For all other problems, he always requested one of the male doctors.”