The 6 Most Disgusting Things I Have Seen and Done as a Nurse

(WARNING: this post contains graphic content and is not for the faint of heart. If you are prone to throwing up, read this at your own risk. I'm serious.)

(WARNING: this is also a very long post.)


I began working in the field of healthcare 6 years ago this month. Something happened the other day (more on that incident later) that made me reflect on all the nasty, disgusting, vomit-worthy things I have seen and done as a CNA/nurse. It's a wonder that despite all those things, I have never once in my entire healthcare career even come close to vomiting on the job. I've never even gagged, dry heaved, or passed out. So, in honor of my 6 years in healthcare and with no further adieu, here is a list of The 6 Most Disgusting Things I Have Seen and Done as a Nurse (they are numbered for convenience and not really ranked because they are all winners):


6. On my first day of CNA clinicals, the nurse told me she needed my help with something. With no hint of what she needed me for, I followed her into a room that smelled like poop. Sure enough, a sickly hispanic man was lying in his bed... which was completely saturated with liquid fecal matter (diarrhea). He was literally lying in a bath of his own excrement. He also happened to be delirious, and he had managed to smear the poo all over his body. The nurse methodically stripped him naked (which was also the first time I ever saw a naked male patient) and told me to put on some gloves. After that point, I have little memory of what happened, except that the entire time I wished I could plug my nose (but couldn't, because my hands were covered in poo) and I hoped I wasn't staring too much at the man's nakedness (it didn't take long after that to be able to tune it out). This item represents not only this incident, but all of the other times that I have entered a patient's room to discover they are lying in a diarrhea bath in their bed. It's happened more times than I can remember.


5. On my second day of CNA clinicals, a nurse approached me and asked if I would like to help with a dressing change. "Sure," I said. What else was I going to say? I barely even knew what a dressing change was at that point. He handed me a gown, mask, and gloves, and snickered, "This is a bad one. You're not going to want to eat a cheeseburger tonight after this one." He continued to snicker as I clumsily donned the isolation attire. He was clearly looking forward to watching me throw up.


We entered the room and joined a group of about six other people who encircled the bed. At first I honestly didn't even know what I was looking at. The nurse who had recruited me explained, "This is a bed sore." I was confused; I learned in class that a bed sore was a skin ulcer that typically formed over a bony prominence such as the hip, the heel, or the elbow. This was a bed sore to end all other bed sores. The patient was lying on his belly with his back side exposed. The bed sore extended from a few inches below his shoulder blades and all the way down to his upper thighs. The nurse pointed at a whitish thing and said, "That is the sacrum." I gulped. Bone? He pointed again, "And that is the anus." It was only then that I noticed the hole where his butt cheeks should have been. As I watched in horror, poo oozed from the hole and a nurse across from us wiped it away with a washcloth. About 30 seconds after she wiped it, the hole oozed again, as it continued to do for the duration of my observation.


It is difficult to describe what a bed sore of that size looks like; however, those of you who understand how disgusting even a small bed sore can be will probably be able to imagine it. This one, naturally, was infected with probably every nosocomial superbug known to man. The saddest thing about it? The patient was a quadriplegic and had developed the ulcer as a result of negligence by his caretakers.


4. Melanie and I worked with each other as CNAs at a certain nursing home that shall remain unnamed. It was a rare occasion that we worked with each other on the same unit for the same shift, but it was on one of those rare days that this lovely experience happened. We have reminisced about it ever since. :)


We had a patient for quite some time who was a paraplegic and had developed a bed sore on his butt (ischial tuberosities) as a result of his own neglicence and poor hygeine. The sore grew until it had eaten away the depth of the tissue on his butt, creating an oval-shaped, infected, gaping hole. From there, a phenomenon called "tunneling" occurred, in which the infection spread to the adjacent tissues and ate away the flesh under the skin. It might be hard to picture it, but basically the sore extended under the skin in both directions away from the hole on his butt... up to his lower back and down his legs to his knees. That means that if you were to put your finger in the sore, you would eventually have to reach most of your forearm into the sore in order to reach the end of it. That is "tunneling." It's pretty much what it sounds like. The infection makes a tunnel under the skin.


The pus and fluid of his massively infected bed sore would accumulate in the tunneled space of the backs of his legs as he sat in his wheelchair and watched TV. Then, when it was time for a dressing change, he would swing himself onto the bed, subsequently squirting the fluid out of the hole on his butt and all over the bed and everything near it. We had to layer multiple towels and absorbent pads on the bed in order to catch most of it (and it still inevitably spilled over onto the floor). The smell of the fluid is absolutely indescribable. I have never, ever smelled anything worse. That is saying a lot, because I have smelled a great deal of nasty smells. This smell went beyond nasty and beyond any rotten smell my senses can conceive. It was this smell that sent another CNA (on a different day) running from the room to vomit.


So the story goes as follows: the patient's doctor came to assess his wound. He had Melanie and I position the patient on the bed (squirt, splash) so he could remove the guauze from the tunneled flesh. After he removed it and assessed the wound, he went to find the nurse to come and repack the wound. He returned and reported that the nurse was nowhere to be found (she had a tendency to disappear at crucial moments). "Well," he said matter-of-factly, "just repack the wound yourselves. Tell the nurse I stopped by." Then he threw his gloves in the trash and quickly left the room. Melanie and I just stared at each other in shock. After a moment we simultaneously shrugged our shoulders and began repacking the wound, shoving the gauze down, down, down his legs as far as we could shove it. It was so disgusting. What more can I say?

It is only in hindsight that we have realized how many laws we violated in following the doctor's orders to dress the wound. "Scope of practice," anyone? haha. Good times.


3. As a nurse in the burn unit, I saw a lot of nasty stuff. One in particular stands out in my mind as much for its uniqueness and absurdity as anything else. I was heading into the "tank room" to assist with a dressing change. The head wound care nurse walked beside me and whispered, "This is a really bad one. He has gangrene on his groin. Are you sure you want to help out?" I was pregnant at the time, and everyone was overly concerned that my gag reflex was weak. I assured him I was fine, now more curious than ever about the wound.


Once the dressings were removed from the "groin wound," I could only stare. I knew what was supposed to be there and what it should look like, but I was at a loss for explanation. It took me-- no kidding-- the entire length of the dressing change to figure out what had happened to the patient's "stuff." The gangrene had completely eaten away his scrotum, leaving his raw testicles exposed, not to mention every other tendon/muscle/tissue that exists down there. The outer layer of skin on his penis was also completely gone. I basically saw a man's groin with the flesh eaten away from it. I'm just gonna end this one now.


2. On the burn unit I once helped give post-mortum care to a patient who had died from a rare skin infection. The infection had eaten away most of the skin, even the eyelids and most of the nose, etc. As we began washing the body, we removed the dressings that covered nearly all of the patient's body. Since I was pregnant at the time, I had not worked with this patient much because the infection was so severe, and had therefore never seen the full extent of the infection. I was horrified to see, as we carefully removed the dressings, that the infection had eaten away not just the skin, but most of the flesh beneath it. All that remained was dead, rotten, gray-green tissue. Everywhere. Even the fingers and toes were black and shriveled. Dead. Everything was dead. And the smell of rotten flesh was almost unbearable. I couldn't eat that night. I had to block that one out of my mind for a long time. Even now I shiver just remembering it.

1. As a new CNA in a nursing home, I often got delegated the most undesirable tasks by the rest of the staff. One morning, a veteran CNA motioned for me to follow her down the hall. "I have something for you to do," she whispered, trying not to smile. We stopped at an open door to a room at the end of the hall. A morbidly obese woman sat in an oversized, automatic wheelchair at the center of the room. I raised my eyebrows in question, and the CNA just said, "Look closely." It was then I noticed the trail of diarrhea leading from the floor where we stood to the back of her wheelchair. My eyes followed the poop trail up the back of the wheelchair to where it was oozing out from between the woman's obese rear end and the cushion of the chair. "Oh," I said, having no idea where to begin. The only thing I knew about this patient was that she weighed over 400 lbs. and could barely stand on her own.


The CNA stifled another smile and began gathering supplies: a walker, gloves, a garbage can, and several boxes of wipes. She placed the walker in front of the woman, the garbage can off to the side of the wheelchair, and the gloves and wipes on a small bedside table. She bent down and removed two extra garbage bags from the garbage can and handed them to me. "Here," she said, "put these on your arms." I did as she said, still not understanding what to do as she tied the open ends of the bags securely around my upper arms. Then she handed me two pairs of latex gloves. "Put these on, too." A smile slowly spread across her face, and I realized what she expected me to do. In that moment I hated her for making me do what I was about to do, and I hated being the rookie CNA. She turned and walked out of the room, chuckling to herself as she went.


I then proceeded, grunting and straining, to assist the 400-lb. woman to stand up with her walker. Diarrhea slid down her legs and onto the floor as she stood. "Uh... lean forward on the walker," I instructed, as the woman apologized profusely for the situation. I felt bad for her, but I felt worse for me. I then removed her saturated pants and wiped down the poopy wheelchair as quickly as I could. Then I turned toward the real task at hand: her enormous rear end.


You see, the... uh, crack... of a 400-lb. person's rear end is not like that of a normal butt. It's like an 18-inch deep crevice with rolls and folds and hidden places like the unchartered territory of... oh, I don't know. It's just gross. So... I dove in, garbage-bagged arms and all. Again and again I reached in and pulled out handful after handful of poop. I was literally up to my face in poopy buttcrack.


Just as I was wiping the last of the diarrhea from her enormous bottom, she cried, "Oh no! Oh no! I have to go again! I'm so sorry-- I-- I'm going again! Oh nooooo..." and she then proceeded to poop again... all over everything I had just sacrificed my dignity to wipe clean. I could only stare in horror. I wanted to cry. But I didn't. I just rebagged my arms and did it all over again. These days, I would get paid over $20/hour as a nurse for torture like that. Back then, I only got $8/hour. At least I got a great story out of the experience. It's one of my favorites.

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Most likely, all of you will agree that these experiences are utterly disgusting. If you don't, you are probably a nurse.

So, after all of this, I have still never even so much as gagged on the job. In fact, until last October, I had not vomited since I was 7 years old and had the stomach flu. An hour before I went into labor, I ate an entire frozen pizza because I hadn't eaten all day. I regretted it when, at 2 am and 4 cm, I barfed all of it into a toilet in the labor and delivery triage room. I was sad to give up my vomit-free streak of 15 years, but I was in labor and didn't really care.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is how ridiculous it is that I don't even gag over experiences like those in my Top 6, but other comparatively mild unpleasantries will nearly make me puke. Case in point: as I was composing my last post, my child crawled over to the sliding doors by the computer and began playing with the window blinds. I soon heard those unmistakable noises that always indicate he has something in his mouth. I snatched him up and opened his mouth, expecting to see a stray goldfish cracker or something. Instead, I found the large, partially-chewed torso of a dead bug!! It was large enough for me to notice the stripes on its belly and that it had only one giant leg still attached. "Ewwww!!!!" I shrieked, and flung the bug torso across the room. I gagged and considered bolting for the bathroom, but Joshua smiled widely and I saw another particle in the corner of his mouth... I plucked out another giant leg, shrieked loudly, and again flung it across the room. I could tell that he still had more bug in his mouth by the way he was still drooling and chewing, but before I could reach my finger in his mouth again he swallowed it!!!!! Ahhhhh!!! I nearly lost it. Joshua found all of this hilarious.

I must be messed up since I would prefer scooping diarrhea out of a 400-lb. woman's rear end to plucking a dead bug out of my child's mouth. Maybe I need help.