btp is a teacher now

I bet you guys are all so frustrated. You're walking around your home, scratching your head and thinking: Man I wish btp would hurry up and tell us about the guy who pooped.

I hate to say that it is not that interesting of a story. I may have hyped it up too much.

First off though I want to make a personal note to my secret santee: My bad. I'm sorry it is so late.

I didn't actually do anything Christmas-related until the eve of, and that included purchasing and wrapping gifts for all those people I was going to see the day of. Those sort of took priority. Then, after the holiday cheer had subsided, I was left with the conundrum: What the heck do I do for this guy? (Also, I assume you are a guy.) I was too proud to ask Fogel for advice (this was probably a mistake) and I had a little ditty in my head so I thought: "HEY I CAN MAKE A SONG". Turns out I am absolutely terrible at making songs. I always have been. I think I autotuned some podcast quotes and looped them to snares once but even that was lackluster and my hoard of expensive pirated software is locked away on my virus ridden computer (virused probably because of all that pirated software!)

Anyway I had another idea which then bombed but now I have an ACCEPTABLE and DOABLE gift idea. It will require some time and daylight to complete however, things which I am not in abundance of. Simply put though I WILL PUT MY HEART INTO IT once I am able to finish it.

Anyway about the GUY WHO POOPED. I actually wasn't there for the pooping. This is sort of a second hand story. I have a much better first hand story but it involves me making a terrible mistake and maybe could put me in some legal trouble and basically I may have killed a man. (to be honest though, that is a very somber and serious story, and whenever I try to make light of it, I end up feeling a little sad.)

There is a third story, which is hardly exciting at all but I figure why not I can write it here.

I am a huge fan of stories.

So...POOP-GUY.

A few days ago, last week I think? I ended up working on the front of the unit (the unit is shaped like an '8' with 40 rooms total, the first 1-20 rooms are the 'front', the rest are the 'back')

So I get a report from the previous PCA which gives me a quick detailing of each patient. If they're 'total care' then that means you'll be changing their diapers, and possibly feeding and turning them. 'Assist to the Bedside commode' means that whenever they have to go, they'll call and you have to walk/hoist them over to the little bedside pot, 'Assist to the bathroom' means that you just have to walk with them and make sure they don't get tangled, and 'Self' means that they can pretty much take care of themselves.

Well this one guy was a 'self' patient. He walked around, did his own thing, and all I did was take his vital signs a few times and that was it.

Then I went home had a good weekend and came back on Monday.

I had the same guy again. This time the report was different. The PCA sat down with me and huffed.

It was that kind of "huff" that is both from exhaustion and relief. It is the kind of huff that you don't really want to hear when you know that you are going to be picking up wherever that person left off.

"This guy is going to give you trouble. The entire room smells like pee. He just got up and started peeing on the floor. I've given him a bath twice.

(that is a big deal because baths are basically the most time and effort consuming thing you can do with a patient. If someone gets a bath, and then gets another bath, there have been some special circumstances.)

"He is confused, and will wander into other patients rooms if you don't watch him. If he gets up you can maybe coax him into going back into bed."

She gave me the rest of the report...and then oh hey that guy's bed alarm went off. Welp.

So I walked in and he was sitting up, and pushing at this little table-tray that we keep in the rooms. I pull my "Oh goodness what is this noise in here?" routine to turn off the bed alarm and maybe not have the person be ticked off at me for having them on a bed alarm. He didn't notice.

Which is good and bad...he wasn't upset at having a bed alarm on him but mainly because he wasn't present enough to realize that there was even such thing as a bed alarm.

Or that he was even sitting on a bed.

I'm going to jump ahead in time here, after the hallway-pooping (which I was not there for) and go to the point where I've been officially assigned to just watch this guy. He's been given some stuff to make him sleepy, but he's still trying to get out of bed.

I don't want him to get out of bed. I would very much like it if he stayed in bed but there he is putting on his shoes and tying knots in the laces. I decide to do something which I am not very good at and generally very reluctant to do with any other person.

I try and hold a conversation.

It's not an easy thing to do with someone who is doped up and not really all there, but I managed to learn a lot about him.

He was from Michigan. He had lived and worked in a Detroit body shop. He had some children that lived in Texas. He loved the great lakes and he really liked to fish. He had a car (I forget the name) that would take him "wherever I want to go".

He seemed really proud of that fact. There was a love for his car in that little statement. Most confused elderly guys, I've found that they frequently ask about their cars. They mean a lot to them.

I've never really seen my car as a liberating force, something that would take me "wherever I want to go". I see it more as a transport that "gets me to work; sometimes it breaks". Maybe I have been using it wrong.

Even this confused old guy, with 70+ years had a story. He maybe couldn't remember all the parts (who can?) but there was a real history with him. He was more than the guy who pooped in the hall. I guess everyone is.

It's why I like stories so much.

Anyway jumping back in time, pre-poop. He was lifting the tray in the room. I get him back in bed. He gets up. He starts trying to lift the bed. He mutters something about "glass" and how this "part is stuck".

It wasn't until later that I realized he thought the bed was a car, and that he was doing body work on it, and expected me to help him. Each time he got up to try and lift the bed (this guy was pretty strong), and each time I went in the room, turned the alarm off and coaxed him back in bed.

I went to the nurse and told her: "This guy is going to keep getting up. We need to restrain him somehow otherwise he is going to get up when neither of us can get to him and he is going to fall or hurt himself."

This was a true statement. It was a genuine and reasonable reason for wanting to put this individual in a position where he could not get up. The real motivation for this statement though was probably "So I won't have to fool with him anymore."

I suppose there's a bit of irony that, because of this, I ended up having to fool with him exclusively.

So the nurse gives him Ativan. Ativan makes you sleepy and less anxious.

Generally.

Anyway, the Ativan had the opposite effect. Instead of making him stay in bed and sleep, it made him wobbly and restless and even more disoriented and confused.

They don't shoot you with a tranq gun if you act up in the hospital. There's no needle that when you get injected with you suddenly go limp and fall asleep. There is a bunch of procedures and protocols for getting doctors to approve various methods of physical and chemical restraints which take hours to get and even then the drugs given are in such minor doses that the effects tend to be gradual. (though I guess they may linger longer? I am not a doctor.)

So he started to wander into the hallway. He'd walk a few feet. Then stop and lay down on the floor. We'd pick him up and walk him back to the bed but nope he doesn't want to lay down on the bed, he wants to move it around and try and lift the rails on it.


oh hey while I'm being a butt and typing this apparently Noodly/Alicely (goodness I am glad that is not a secret anymore) is video chatting with some Medieval literature professor at Glasgow she met online just now while watching "true grit"?

HOW DOES SHE DO THIS?

It is an enigma. I simply do not understand it. I am forever amazed by the fact that, despite her frightening and uncanny ability to meet new and interesting people she continues to insist that I am the one for her.

Oh crap. I was going to add "also she got me ____" as a way of expressing something cool or awesome she got me for christmas but I CAN'T REMEMBER WHAT SHE GOT ME FOR CHRISTMAS. crap crap crap crap. Maybe she didn't get me a thing? is that what we agreed on? I got her a thing but that was because I went against the not getting things thing. Maybe she didn't get me a thing because I am notoriously terrible at receiving gifts? Like "Hey I got you an original Sega Genisis with a bunch of games" "oh cool. I never played sega. I'm not a big fan of sonic." or "I got you a beast wars collectors book that lists every beast wars toy ever made." "oh, cool, a book. can you return it?" (For the record when I actually read through that book it was AMAZING and I LOVE IT.) Wait I remember now.

Paintings. She gave me some paintings that she drew that I liked and she told me she was going to give to a friend but really gave them to me instead and once I get some frames they are gonna decorate this place up.

Anyway back to that guy.

I went to lunch.

There have been several instances where I have left a particularly troublesome patient and gone to lunch and, upon my return I find out something terrible has happened.

There was the stocky confused lady who I came back to find screaming, her arms and legs held down on the bed by security while the nurse pumped her full of more Ativan ™. Then there was the angry black suicide patient who hated being told what to do and apparently had to be forced back into his room by security because they didn't want him to go outside and smoke. (that is also a neat story).

Now there was this guy. Apparently he walked out of his room, started peeing, and pooped in the hall. Housekeeping was doing a lot of mopping.

That was when the charge nurse decreed that I was going to forgo taking care of my other patients and just sit with him until later.

Thus my conversation with him, which was really just me asking him a bunch of questions in an effort to distract him.

There were really only two more notable things with this guy. The charge nurse (actually I think it was the same nurse that helped out with that confused lady that wrote 157 a bunch), she came in with the patient's nurse and tried to hold the guy's arm to check his IV and the guy freaked out. He grabbed her arm and started to squeeze it as tightly as he could while saying "I'm gonna break it. I'm gonna break it." We pried his hands off and security was called and the charge nurse had bruises and the confused old guy who pooped in the hall sat in bed and mumbled: "I shouldn't have done that, I'm sorry I shouldn't have done that."

The second thing was, late in the shift, he started to get out of bed again. I tried to coax him to lie down like I had done before but he was a bit more determined this time. I had managed to get a diaper on him earlier, so I wasn't too worried about him voiding. Anyway he said "restroom" so I walked him over and started to nudge him towards the toilet, stopping him whenever he paused to try to take off one of the fixtures on the wall. The bathroom door was being held open by the little trash can (something we do pretty regularly) and he kicked at it a bit.

"Okay leave that alone, lets head over to the toi- oh no wait that's...oh okay."

and he just started whizzing in the wastebasket.

He went back to his nursing home the following morning - much to the rejoicing of the nursing staff. The drugs had apparently kicked in and he was pretty docile all that morning. "Like a big teddy bear" one of the nurses had said.

I have more stories, like I said, but I think I'll stop there for now.