Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II

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Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous.
I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by the Duchess. Hi.
The Sharky Sharky Duchess. We need to do these more.
We need to do these as regularly as poopy your pants because nurses deliver. Every time.
Holy smokes, do they deliver. It's so harrowing, their job.
It is, boy. They go through it all.
Day in and day out. I love nurses so much.
I know. Me too.

They're just a party in their stories.

They have great personalities.

They have to.

Yeah.

You have to be so mentally tough.

Yeah.

And positive.

And positive.

And funny.

I know.

To get through.

I know.

It's really special.

We learned a new term as well.

I've already forgotten it, but we learned a term about an object in your butt.

And it has a very specific terminology. It might even become a prompt.
Object. Fuck, what is it? Should we look at it? Rectum.
Rectal foreign body. Foreign body.
We learned that all nurses have a foreign body and rectum story. Which is exciting as all hell.
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How are you guys? I'm going to go out on a limb right now. You're the first of four nurses we're going to talk to.
And the second I saw your face, I literally was like, all right, nurses are the most fun people on the planet. Thank you.
That's the biggest compliment. I'd like to think I'm a fun person.
Anyone that can see the shit you guys see hourly and be laughing and smiling. I mean, that's my kind of people.
Well, if you don't laugh, you'll cry. It's a good attitude.
So goes the adage. Where are you at, Peyton? I'm in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Okay. How do you like it there? I like it.
I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and this is a small town feel. We're just here because my husband's going to grad school.
So it's just a short two years. It's charming, no? Oh yeah.
Very historic, but yeah. But a troubled past.
Is that what you wanted to say? Or a beating around the bush that the most horrific thing ever happened there. Is that palpable when you're there or have people moved on? It's palpable, especially because I work in an elementary school now as a nurse, and it's crazy.
They have to do a whole bunch of rezoning for the school districts because it was historically racist zoning. So now they're like trying to go back and redo it all.
Wow. Yeah.
I'm going to add, I have another stereotype, not just about nurses, but I have a stereotype about Minnesotans. I would argue that Minnesotans are like Michiganders, but a little even elevated.
What's that mean? They have so much Scandinavian in them, right? That they're modest by nature. They hate attention and acclaim.
So it's kind of the same stock as Michigan, but they have this nice layer of humility, I'd say. I would say the humility aspect didn't hit me.
Oh, good. I love talking about Minnesota.
I think it's the best. Well, home of Prince, any place that can claim Prince.
Yeah. Okay.
I'm sure you've racked up many stories as a nurse, but you're going to hit us with one in particular. This is back in 2021 in Minneapolis.
I'm a new baby nurse and I'm working in the emergency department. I came in and I had an empty room and I was the next to get a patient.

Lucky me, which is always scary.

So I go to the room, I meet the patient.

Immediately upon entering the room,

I am struck with the worst smell in the world.

Oh, perfect.

I just ate.

This is great.

Immediate infection smell.

Oh, infection smell is such a bad combo of words.

Well, evolutionarily, it has to be the one where most repulse spark.

I have a mask on, which I don't think is really doing much, but maybe a little.

Do you guys ever put anything under your nose?

We have little like essential oil sticks.

One time Dax said you should put a Jolly Rancher in there.

I did say that?

Yeah, you did.

Oh, have you tried that?

I'll try that next time.

Don't try that because I don't want you to choke.

I'm assessing this patient.

I'm like, where is this coming from?

I don't see anything right away, but she's like the cutest little five foot little grandma.

Oh, grandma.

For sure.

But she's old.

Okay.

Old Monica.

In her 70s, she has a scarf wrapped around her head.

And I am like, what's your emergency? What brings you in? She says, oh, I just haven't been feeling well the past few days. She doesn't really go on.
And I'm like, what's your history? And she says, well, nine months ago, I had a cranioplasty. What's that? A section of her skull was missing from a birth defect.
And so she had to have a mesh plate put in to reform the skull. She really waited a while, it sounds like.
She got through most of her life with this gap. I think it's something that gets redone.
That makes sense. I leave the room to go get the doctor, brief them that you might want to put a double mask on.
We go back into the room and the doctor's like, can you take your scarf off? I want to see you. Like, what's happening under there? Oh no.
She removes it. There's a quarter to half an inch slit open at the top of her forehead.
We can see the mesh plate. Oh.
And her brain. Oh.
You can see grandma's brain? No. We can see granny's brain.
Her brain. And we're like, all right, there we go.
Bingo. Apparently brains stink.
Now we know. And it like is very clearly infected.
It's like red. It doesn't look well.
Am I right to assume that's the last thing you want infected? Definitely. And she was off in all the ways.
What happens if the scarf comes off and you go, you can't help it sometimes. You can't do that.
Can you? Did you? I mean, you definitely probably shouldn't, but being a new nurse, thank God for the mask because I was not expecting grandma's brain to be out. Of course.
Right. You're not watching Pulp Fiction.
You're only human. Yeah.
So we're like, have you been taking care of it? And she's like, I was taking pretty good care of it. I keep the scarf on.
I change the gauze. It's been going well.
Like, okay. Has anything been irritating it? Anything you can think of? And she says, no, I take the scarf off at night and then my cats like to lick it.
Stop it! Yes. This is the nasty...
Nurses have all the deets. I almost said something really bad.
I'm not going to say it. She deserves to.
Don't victim shame her. You're going to let your cat lick your open brain? She said she likes to.
She wants to make mittens happy. And also, she didn't do her research.
Cats love human brains. They eat them.
Well, they eat their face. Yeah, yeah.
The cat got a little ahead of itself. I think the cat was like, grandma's dying and dead and I can't wait.
I definitely think mittens was like, she's on her way out. I got to have a slice.
So she obviously had to be admitted to the hospital because that's not good. But since it was COVID time, it took three days to get her from the emergency department up to a room.
So for the three days she was down there, the entire back hallway just smelled the whole time. We obviously attempt to clean it.
We started IV antibiotics and would do the basic treatment, but we weren't, like, getting in there. Yeah.
Because someone needed to go in there surgically and get rid of this necrotic flesh and everything. And drain all the cat saliva.
Pull the cat babies out of her. Don't say cat babies in a brain.
Oh, my God. Mittens, kittens.
God. She was kind of like Voldemort.
You know when what's his name's wearing the scarf and then he takes off and Voldemort's there? Yes, Professor Quirrell. Yes.
I literally was thinking that. It's literally that.
Oh my God. You never know what someone's hiding under there.
And what was her spirits? She sounds very nice. She was the sweetest little lady.

So kooky.

If you were in the room, she'd tell you everything you wanted to know about anything.

Yeah, but she was also crazy.

Literally cat saliva-induced crazy.

Madness?

Yeah.

Maybe you can say madness.

So we don't know if she was nice or not.

Maybe that was part of the delirium.

What ended up happening to Granny?

She got a room, obviously. She got a room, and that's all I know.
I'm glad. I don't want to know the end of this.
This is rough. At this hospital, we had a lot of frequent flyers, and I never saw her again.
Okay. Well, that's good.
And would you have heard if she had passed in that upstairs room? Would they have told you? Probably. Okay.
So I think all signs point to, she's probably with mittens now on her lap. All signs point to, she turned into a cat.
I think her brain turned into a cat brain, and now she thinks she's a cat. Peyton, what if you saw her boogieing down the sidewalk on all fours with the most agility you'd ever seen? That would be amazing.
I'd have to call you guys back. What an experiment.
I have a hunch we're going to talk to you again, because I'm sure you were probably debating which story to even tell. I was talking to my husband, and I was like, I don't have any stories, just the cat lady.
He was like, yeah, you should submit that. That's a pretty good one.
Just the cat lady. That really puts a new spin on cat lady.
Yeah. Do you think that's Laura's dream in life? No, don't say that.
To have her brain licked by her cat. Ew, probably.
This is what happens with people who love cats. They love them way too much.
It's kind of a good ending. I guess so.
Oh, what a joy that was. Thank you.
Thanks for sharing. Can my husband come say hi? Of course.
Oh, you're as cute as they come. Look at the symmetry.
It's completely homogeneous. And you're in graduate school.
And your teeth are that nice. It's awesome to see you guys.
I wanted to say we drove from Virginia to Minneapolis before the holidays, which is about 18 hours. And we listen almost exclusively to Armchair.
Oh, that's so nice. Is there one moment that was your favorite? Any anonymous, but we just listened to the Munchausen by Proxy Andrea Dunlop.
I don't have Munchausen, want to say? Oh, yeah. Thank you for clarifying.
Well, you guys don't have a child yet. No, you can still have it with a partner and stuff.
But it's most common for the mother to be in the medical.

We'll let you know.

Okay.

Keep us updated on that.

Well, again, we were going to talk to you about another nurse story, but it might be like,

tell us about a story of inflicting moon chalsens on your child.

I'll wait for that prompt for sure.

Well, delightful meeting both of you.

Good luck down there in Virginia.

Thank you very much.

So nice to meet you.

Bye.

Hello. Is this Lucy? Yes, it is.
How you doing? Have we caught you at work? Yes, I'm at work in a nice fancy little telephone booth. And if there were any doubt of the validity to your claim of being a nurse, you are currently in scrubs, which really lends to your case.
Yeah, right? I'm out of the bedside now. So I'm in healthcare education and simulation.
Oh, and where are you in the country? I'm up in Canada. Okay.
So I assume you have a kabillion stories you could have told. Did you have a hard time whittling it down to which one? No, I definitely have a lot of stories, but this one has just always been kind of in the forefront.
So I've been in the emergency room for most of my career, always small town, always rural hospitals. So you can get creative.
Farming accidents. Wood splitter against foot, you know, never a good thing.
So I've done some travel nursing too, and small urban cities to fly in, fly out communities. Oh, like in the bush, you mean fly in, fly out? More on the coast in BC or up in the Yukon.
Oh, wow. It's been very cool.
Who would have thought nursing could take you as many places as like a flight attendant? And be able to make a good income and have some paid travel and accommodation and learn and meet a lot of cool people and see the country at the same time. So this would be the one you're at a dinner party and they want to hear a story.
This is the one you always reel out. If they're with nurses or other healthcare providers, sure.
But not a layman. Not for civilians.
So small town emerged, someone comes into triage after biking in from a neighboring community. It's like a 15 minute drive.
So it's not a short bike. Comes in, not really saying much, not making great eye contact, being a little elusive, just repeating that he wants to see a doctor.
We try and obtain a little bit more pertinent information. The triage process is important and only get out of them pain back there.
Great, because I was going to say the times I've had to go to the doctor and talk about something I just really don't want to talk about. I have decided I'm willing to tell this one person in your mind, you've committed to that.
And then you get there and you start realizing,

no, I'm going to have to tell many people. And I hate that.
Is that common? Where like,

they don't really want to tell you because they've already decided only one person shall ever know

this. Yeah, it could happen.
And then also at the same time, like you're writing it down. So

that's a whole other added layer that people don't love. Yeah.
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podcast in the survey and select our show in the drop-down menu that follows. So they're referencing pain back there, just being pretty elusive and not wanting to say much.
So we respect that and then get them back. So the physician goes into assess a little bit later, comes out and orders some abdominal imaging.
A little while later, imaging is ready and we review it to find a foreign body lodged nicely between those pelvic bones. So deep up into his rectum.
Yeah. So like a little callback, this person biked in.
Right. Oh my God.
Yeah. All I can imagine hearing this is every pedal revolution, you know, just going up a little bit further each time.
Oh no, this is sad. And is it clear from the imaging what the object is? So it definitely had the structure of a bottle.
The person just wasn't really saying a whole lot to everyone. So it had a bottle-like shape, but I wouldn't be able to be like, oh, that's a Coke bottle or something.
Right. But we're a rural hospital.
We try and get creative with what you have. Babies do get delivered here.
And there are vacuum-assisted devices for babies that it was pitched to see if maybe that could work. Ultimately, it didn't go with that because the physician could barely reach the object.
If you had to guess how many inches beyond the anus it was, could you guess? He said he could barely touch it with his finger. Wow.
Three or four inches up there. This physician's probably like your stature too.
He really had a long finger to work with. Yes, so he could feel it a little bit, but obviously a vacuum can't suction to that small of a piece and that piece of plastic, whatever it might have been.
It took a lot of convincing and encouraging, but he really needed to go to the city to have a procedure to get it removed. The other concern with imaging was there's free air on the x-ray, which means something might have perforated.

So there's more severity there that you don't want to mess around with rurally.

And then also, if you were just to simply like pull it out, it creates a vacuum. Oh.
You kind of maybe got to fill air around it. You might have to be inflating basically as you pull it out.
Or like have another hole in it elsewhere to kind of help prevent a vacuum and have all the intestines come with it. I mean, there's a lot to think about.
Yeah, a lot to think about beforehand. This poor person, they finally came around to heading to the city.
So a lot of times people don't necessarily come back for discharge or anything like that. Usually when they go, that's the last time we'll see them.
Oh, I'm going to guess. I mean, his bike is there.
Yeah. The next day he came back into Emerge to pick up his bike seat.
I find this sad. I know.
I feel so much for this person. It would be such a hard thing.
It would. They have to go back to get your bike.
And also, you just had a pretty massive procedure up there and you're going to now ride. The fact that he biked there in the first place.
Yeah. I don't know what kind of procedure he had.
It obviously wasn't an open abdominal anything because they were able to walk in the next day. Do we know what it was? I bet there'd be like a HIPAA issue.
Like they couldn't call the next hospital and be like, hey, what was that? Wouldn't that violate HIPAA somehow? Yeah, I don't have confirmations of anything. Just what I saw on the x-ray, which was impressive for sure.
I have an immediate guess. I think it was a bottle of conditioner.
I think he was in the shower and he decided to masturbate and he thought it might feel nice to have this bottle up his butt. Now, when you think back in your mind of the image, could it have been a conditioner bottle? It definitely looked like a drink bottle.
Okay. Oh, wonderful.
I take it all back. He was sitting on a picnic table having a nice cold.
It was an accident. It was a pure accident.
He just sat down and got up there. It's the classic slip and fall.
Yeah, classic. And I'm sorry to ask for this detail, but my assumption now is that the thin end was first.
Yeah, of course. Okay.
Also, do you think it was full? Of the soda or whatever? Yeah. No, because the cap would have had to have been on.
Also, that's what I'm thinking about, the cap in you. No, he would have taken the cap.
I think it might have come up a bit more opaque, too, with the liquid in it. But yeah, classic slip and fall.
I'm sure many nurses have this story. I hope he figured out how to enjoy that hobby without any further complications.
someone wants to do that and that feels nice i'm all for it i just wish he didn't have to ride his bike no that is really a cruel detail of the story plot twist for sure the bike ride in couldn't have been comfortable now i'm double set because he didn't have anyone to call but then i don't know that that's the truth either because he might have just been like there there's no way I'm calling anyone. But he also doesn't have a car.
The only mode of transportation he has is that bike. That's a little telling.
It's also a small rural town. People know everyone, right? That's even worse.
Well, Lucy, this has been incredible. I kind of had fingers crossed we would get something stuck up the butt story.
You read about those occasionally. Yeah.
I figured it might be appealing in that sense based on what I've heard in the past. Based on the tone of the show, I thought this might interest you.
I've been listening to you guys since it started. This is crazy to see behind the scenes.
We're so happy to have you. Yeah.
Thanks for listening. And from the bottom of my heart, I'm more grateful for y'all than even doctors.
I think the stuff that you guys have to do is just the most impressive. From the bottom of your butt.
From the bottom of my butt to the bottom of your heart. Yeah, nurses are pretty amazing.
All right, well, it was lovely meeting you. And again, thank you so much for the work you do.

Thank you so much for this opportunity.

All right.

Take care.

Bye, guys.

What does bottom of my heart?

The depths of my heart.

The deepest part.

But the deepest part, I feel like, is the center.

You're hung up on bottom because we're talking about someone's bottom.

No, you said from the bottom of my heart.

And then it made me think.

The rectum of the heart. That's my point, is we're talking about bottoms right now.
No, you said from the bottom of my heart and then it made me think. The rectum of the heart.

That's my point,

is we're talking about bottoms right now,

like butt bottoms.

But I'm just saying bottom of the heart

doesn't feel that much more important

than the middle of the heart,

the core, the pulsing part.

From the top of my heart.

Yeah, I'm just curious who made that up.

From the left chamber of my heart.

Probably Winston Churchill.

Probably. Or Abraham Lincoln.
I'm never going to gonna watch that doc you already told me the whole doc it was abraham lincoln hello how are you guys so good do you want to use a code name let's go with the name evan you look like an evan yeah and i like the name evan do you have a best friend named evan or I don't. It's actually a family name.
Oh, okay. So Evan, where are you in the country? You can be as vague as you'd like.
I just am curious. I'm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but funny enough, about a year ago, I moved, I was in LA for 10 years and I lived in a pretty decent apartment complex right near Hollywood and Western.
So I always used to go to Maru and hope that I would run into Monica. Oh, my God.
Well, you're more likely to run into Rob. I'm shocked you didn't run into Rob.
Probably did. You probably did.
But, oh, man, that would have been great. Now, were you on the hunt for Monica so you could explore something romantic with her? No, I'm actually gay.
Oh, okay. Okay.
That's a bummer. I feel like that's more substantive.
Yeah, it's more pure. Yeah.
I'm sorry I missed you. Okay.
So you are a nurse, I presume? I'm an emergency room nurse. For how long? It'll be 14 years this year.
Okay. So you have a juicy story.
I'm sure you've got many, but you have pared it down to this one. Oh, God.
I hope juicy isn't an operating nurse. Oh, I do.
I hope juice is involved in this story. No Juice is in this story, but it's a pretty wild one.
This doesn't take place in LA. It does take place somewhere else in California.
I was working in a pretty busy emergency department. It was a level two trauma center.
So we see pretty much all the crazy gunshots, stabbings, car accidents, falls, all of those things. Will you tell us about the levels? I've never heard it being described as level one or two or three.
It goes from level one to level four. Level one is the highest.
So that's your Cedars-Sinai. The main difference between a level one and a level two is that they have neurosurgery 24 hours a day in-house.
So if you have a head injury, they can do procedures right then and there. Whereas level two, they have to bring a neurosurgeon in or they have to fly the patient depending on their injury to a different facility.
And then down to level four, it just really is resources that are available at that specific facility. So this particular hospital was a level two, but there were only two trauma centers in the area.

So we would get a lot of the traumas and the crazy stuff along with just basic medical patients that come in.

This was around 2017, 2018.

Busy day in the area. So we would get a lot of the traumas and the crazy stuff along with just basic medical patients that come in.
This was around 2017, 2018. Busy day in the emergency department.
We had a lot of traumas coming in. The waiting room was full.
But on top of that, we have a lot of psychiatric patients that are on a 5150 hold. They're there on the hold for 72 hours for whatever reason, either they're suicidal, homicidal, or gravely disabled, meaning they can't care for themselves.
We're kind of responsible for those patients until they get to a psychiatric facility, which sometimes, you know, that can be days that they're in our emergency department. And is protocol to kind of, for lack of a better word, anesthetize them? Do you want to get them on some kind of benzo to calm everyone down? So it depends on their level of how violent they are.
If you come in and just say, hey, you know, I'm thinking of committing suicide, but they're willing to be there voluntarily. That's one thing.
Some other patients will be brought in by the cops because they tried to kill their spouse. At that point, we hold them.
But some of them are cooperative and they're calm. Other patients are a little less calm and we have to end up restraining them physically or we have to sedate them with a chemical restraint.
I remember this day we particularly had I think probably seven or eight psychiatric patients, which is a lot. They will be in our psych rooms and then some of them are in the hallways, but typically they have to be a one-to-one sitter and the person that's watching them has to be within arm's reach in case they try to hurt themselves.
So we're busy doing our thing throughout the day. And the chief medical officer comes to the department and he quickly tells the team, Hey, we just received a call that there was a bomb threat made at the hospital and we need to evacuate the emergency department immediately.
Whoa. Does that mean bring them outdoors?

Bring everyone. Oh my God.
There could be 50 patients, including the psychiatric patients outside. This is the worst kind of bomb threat I'm going to say.
Yeah, this is a mean one.

I've worked places where there's been a threat called in and we typically have security teams

and the police are always there because of various reasons. But this particular day,

he made the decision that we need to evacuate the emergency department. So as ER nurses do, our team figures it out.
A lot of times for disasters, we'll put up tents out in the parking lot. So the team began assembling the tents and trying to get patients out as quickly and as safely as possible.
There may be 50 patients in the department, and there's a handful of nurses. This is horrible.
The worst scenario that you could probably imagine in the emergency department. And we see awful things.
So while trying to maintain all of the other patients, getting them out safely, you know, the people that can't walk on their own, this really sick patients, we have to make sure that all of the psychiatric patients are accounted for. So we get them all outside.
Everything comes together perfectly. There's enough people to watch.
We kind of quarantined the psychiatric patients to one area. We had security guards.
There were cops there that had responded to the event. Everything seems to be going well.
The bomb squad shows up and they clear the hospital. And we're like, what exactly happened here? Why did we so quickly make this decision? So it turns out, luckily, none of the patients were harmed, but the hospital operator, he was off shift, decided to call in a bomb threat.
This was a guy that worked at our hospital, calls in the bomb threat to an operator who is his co-worker. Oh my God.
There was really no way to verify this because they didn't release a 911 tape. But the story is that this person called the operator and the operator was like, is this you, Peter? I recognize your voice.
And he's like, no, no, it's not me. Oh my God.
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Hyundai vehicles have won over 120 IIHS Top Safety Awards from 2006 to 2024 as of December 2024. so the gentleman who was making the bomb threat apparently had made multiple bomb threats he had worked at various facilities over the years he called in a bomb threat to a school to various different township buildings so he was calling in bomb threats for many years they found out that it could have been potentially three or four years prior to this event.
Evan, have you spent any time trying to get into the mind of why that would be satisfying? I can generally find my way into understanding people's motives, but I don't even understand what the pleasure of that is. Other than if I just had this total ire for government and I wanted to keep fucking up municipalities, I can't really get it.
He was calling in the bomb threat and then showing up to work. I think this day he showed up a few hours later.
I don't know if it was a thrill that he got from like being in and out of the chaos. Yeah.
Well, they say that about arsonists, that they often are there watching the fire. But is he a hero? Is it like he comes in to help save the day? I'm sure they're getting numerous calls like, hey, is it safe to come into the hospital? Because I'm sure that word spreads quickly throughout the community.
So I don't know what he was getting from that. Is it a ding, ding, ding? Did he get admitted to the psychiatric ward? I think he got admitted to the jail.
The jail ward. It was a wild day, but that team, I mean, the ER is chaotic all the time, but it shows you how quickly we come together.
And no matter what the task at hand is, we just do what we have to, to keep our patients safe. Yeah.
You're like the Marines. My first thought as someone who's always thinking about mechanical stuff is like, well, certainly among those 50 patients, some of them have to be hooked to machines to stay alive that require electricity.
Are there generators that are put out in the parking lot or are there battery supplies on these carts? So the patients that were on a ventilator at the time, there's two options. And we do have battery supply outside because we have patients with IV pumps, but you can also manually ventilate them.
It's called an Ambu bag. So you can just squeeze a bag to give them breaths.
I don't remember that being a huge issue. And we have respiratory therapists that will kind of manage that.
But yeah, those are things that go into our head. And we do disaster drills throughout the year and set up the tents and kind of practice what we would do in that scenario.
So we truly are prepared at any given time for something like this to happen. It turns out it probably jumped the gun for lack of a better phrase.
We probably didn't need to evacuate, but it was good practice. In my 14 years, I've never experienced anything else like it.
We're so lucky that you guys exist. So lucky.
They're practicing and they can do it. It's a pretty amazing career.
You guys are fortunate to be in LA where there's so many great hospitals. Not going to live.
What? We're not going to live in LA? No, I just... Or are they going to shut down hospitals? Just do it.
Okay, I'm just not sure what thing we're going to... Just do it.
We're afraid to leave LA or... I just don't want to go to the hospital.
Okay. We're not going to...
Because LA has so many good hospitals. I just don't want to go there.
Okay. Don't ask questions.
Just do it. Wow, that's wild.
Oh, man, that is. Thank you, Evan, so much for sharing that story with us.
When I saw the nursing prompt came up, I'm like, I have to submit this story. I mean, I have so many great ones, but that was a very interesting day.
And I don't think that anyone that I worked with will ever forget that. Okay.
I'm just going to ask you one simple question before we go, because the previous nurse we just spoke with said that every single nurse has a foreign object in rectum story. You don't need to tell it.
Just, do have a foreign object in rectum story? I have many. Oh, well, yeah, you were in L.A.
They always fall onto it. Right, of course.
Can you tell us the weirdest object or are you not allowed? I was attacked by my shampoo bottle. I've seen an apple.
Okay. I've seen candlesticks.
Sure. Sure.
That one kind of makes sense. Wooden candlesticks, though.
They didn't choose a wax one. Oh.
Like a fake decorative candlestick, which then splintered. Oh.
It punctured their colon. So I could talk about, you know, those stories for days.
Shit. Maybe we need our own prompt for notice that just foreign.
Oh, rectal. What.
What was it called? Foreign objects and rectal. Not objects.
Foreign agent, maybe? No. Oh, foreign body.
Yeah, he said foreign body. She said foreign body and you said foreign body.
I just want to get the prompt right. Well, I'll submit another one.
Yeah, we look forward to hearing from you again. Okay, well, great meeting you, Evan.
Thank you so much for your job. You guys are doing great work.
Keep it up. Thank you.
We will thank you we will you too all right be well bye bye i can't believe i missed him at maru that's sad foreign body i feel like we're just gonna get weird submissions hopefully well no someone that had someone else's foreign body in their butt oh like a body part yeah we'll have to say medical yeah i'd like to open it up to everybody because maybe someone will be brave enough to tell foreign body and their own rectum story. Because I want to know how you lose control of it.
Because you must have a game plan. Obviously, you're only going to insert so much of it.
And then you go too far. And then I guess you lose grip.
Then you try to get it out and it just goes up. Well, I think often there's another person involved.
Oh, a bad actor. Hi.
Can you hear us? Yes. Can you hear me? Oh, beautifully.
Is this Tori? Yes, we're going to go with Tori. I will warn you guys, I am like the sickest I've ever been in my life.
I'm pregnant and I got norovirus and I'm like this close to calling it. I sound terrible.
I look terrible. So my apologies.
I just want you to know that I was just on a trip with eight people and all eight of us got it. So I'm with you.
I'm in the Noro camp. I can't imagine being pregnant and dealing with this.
It is hellish. It gets scary when you're pregnant, right? It ups the ante a lot.
I think so. I think I got it because I'm pregnant, like because I'm immunocompromised.
I'm more likely to get it because no one else in our travel group got it of course oh really interesting oh i'm so sorry you look like phoebe waller bridge she's very attractive she is she's beautiful thank you from fleabag can i get started yes yeah let it rip okay for patient confidentiality reasons i won't give you specifics on where i'm from where the story took place but central can central Canada, I'm on the prairies. I'll say that.
I got to tell you, you're our second Canadian. We got some crazy nursing stories up here.
I've been a nurse now for six and a half years. I came into this field.
I had no family that worked in healthcare. I had absolutely no idea what to expect.
So that's just kind of a preface to say how ignorant and naive I was to what this job was really like. But yeah, this story takes place on the first job I had and it's job I had up until last year, actually, I took the job right out of graduation at an inpatient neurology and neurosurgery ward at our hospital.
So dealt with a ton of strokes, seizures, traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, brain cancer, spine cancer, anything like that. Really heavy, but got to see some pretty amazing stuff regarding kind of where I'm from.
We do have a really bad epidemic of gang violence here. Oh, really? Yeah, a lot of the prairies.
And my hospital is the level one trauma center for our province. So we get to see it all.
So you get to see some horrific, senseless acts of violence and assaults. Really sad, really awful.
But medically, I got to say, you get to see some pretty cool stuff. Yeah.
So I worked that job for six years. And to this day, the patient I'm going to tell you about is probably the most wild patient I've ever seen.
So this man, a middle-aged guy, he was an ex-con who was beaten ahead with a hammer. When the swelling is really bad in the brain, the surgeons will take off a piece of their skull to let the brain swell and heal because otherwise it'll herniate.
So usually when that happens, we see it all the time, take off usually a front piece, a side piece. If the person's walking around or doing therapy, they must have this helmet on

at all times, obviously, because if they are to fall and hit their head, there's nothing protecting their soft, squishy brain. So this man in particular, just the location of his injury was the back of his head, kind of on like the nape of his neck, because it was at the very back part of his head.
And because he was so wild and agitated, he had to wear this helmet for 24 hours a day, seven days a week in bed. Kind of picture like a hockey helmet that's hard foam.
Trigger warning. We have to restrain heavily a ton of our patients.
That might bother some people. It's for their safety.
It's for our safety. It's temporary.
They have tubes they can pull out. They have such varied levels of awareness of what's going on.
They just rip everything out. They can and do hurt themselves all the time.
So this man was also heavily restrained, depending on the level of their injury and kind of where they are in their recovery. You can't rationalize with them.
You can't reason with them. They can't speak.
When they can speak, their first and only words are always, fuck you. That was the case of this man.
So he was in what we would call seven point restraints. So he had a belt around his waist.
He had this piece of fabric that kind of comes up like a diaper that attaches to the waist and it keeps him from sliding down in bed, getting strangled by it. Seen that before.
He had both of his wrists restrained, both of his ankles restrained to the bed. And then he was so wild and head butting that he had a chest strap on.
And we have to have the bed elevated a little bit because when they're getting tube fed, if they're laying flat, it can put them at risk of choking. So he had the head of the bed up and we had the chest strap there.
Also, this man had what we call posy mitts on. So picture giant puffy oven mitts that are like Velcroed to their hands.
They can't grab or squeeze or scratch or anything. So it's just like boxing.
That's the first part is the visualization of this is how this poor man lived for weeks. Oh, wow.
He put three separate people on injury leave while being that level of restraint from kicking, punching. It's really awful, but I kind of liken it to picture just like a rabid rescue animal in a cage.
They don't know what's going on. They're just fighting you.
So that was this man to this day, one of the most wild ones I've looked after. So the shift that this happened was on a night shift.
I was new and my partner was new. So her and I had both been on this job for like maybe a few months and it's in an observation room.
So there's four patients, there's two nurses, it's close observation. So it's intended for really sick patients or really kind of wild thrashy patients that you need to have eyes on at all times.
Our nursing station's 15, 20 feet away from all of their beds. We can see what's going on at all times.
My partner was on break. It's like one o'clock in the morning.
The lights are all off because it's nighttime. We want them all to sleep.
And I go into this guy's room. He's heavily restrained.
And I see a puddle of liquid on the floor, which is not that unusual in this job. So I turn the light on and I see that it's urine.
And that's a bit unusual because he has a catheter in. Yeah, right.
And I can see he's covered up in a blanket still. I could see the catheter tubings coming out as it should be.
It's secured to the bottom of the bed, the bag as it should be. So I'm like, where is this urine coming from? And I guess I'll stop here.
Do you guys know how catheters get put in and are secured? No, you should tell us. Yeah.
Doesn't it go all the way up into your bladder and there's kind of a balloon on the end? Yes. I figured you would know, Dax.
Have you had a catheter? Thank God. No.
Shockingly, you have. Yeah.
For egg freezing. It's a small rubber tube goes into the urethra.
Once you get urine back, you know you're in the bladder so you can safely inflate the balloon. So on the tubing, there's a side port and you inflate with 10 mils of saline and it inflates the balloon to like two-thirds the size of a golf ball and it's just to keep it in place so then if someone accidentally or purposely like gently tugs on it it's not going to come out however do people rip them out with their balloon fully intact all the time at this job oh my god God.
Oh no, that is the worst thought imaginable. I know, especially for men.
It's atrocious and it's a bloodbath when it happens. That is immediately my next thought.
It's like, well, this guy's wild. He probably somehow got his oven mitt hands on it and ripped it out.
So I pull back the blanket.

The catheter is out.

It's just like sitting on his bed between his legs.

But the balloon is deflated, which is good.

I'm just kind of processing this as I'm seeing it.

I'm like, well, I guess you didn't rip it out.

But I noticed that the side port is gone.

So what I realized, because he had the chest strap on,

but his head that the bed was

elevated he had gotten the catheter in his mouth what and he had chewed off the side port because of that the balloon deflated on its own so that's good he didn't rip it right out of his penis but then he grabbed the catheter in his mouth with his teeth and ripped it out of his penis Jesus.

Why?

Why?

Why?

Because he doesn't know what the fuck's going on.

That was a few months on the job. Oh, boy.
That was my introduction to nursing and neuro nursing. Oh, do you ever get to see the people when they return to sanity? Yes.
That's what I loved about working there is some of them were there for months and we're acute. So we're supposed to medically stabilize them.
And then the ones that need further neurological rehab would go to another facility in our city. But our doctors were really good at like, hey, so-and-so is doing so good.
You should hear. But this guy recovered really well.
By the time we sent him to rehab, he was walking, he was talking, he was eating he was like wheeling himself around the unit in his wheelchair he was very brain injured he was very childlike almost i remember he would throw some temper tantrums i think he probably would have needed some kind of care his whole life but he wasn't aggressive no oh he was just a kind of a big child but yeah you do get to see them recover even in their time on our unit, which is so fulfilling. Yeah.
Yeah. Wow.
That's crazy. Wow.
Was there any point having not had any family members in it and maybe not having the correct expectations for the job? Were there moments at the beginning where you're like, oh, fuck this. I didn't choose right? Or did you immediately know it was for you? I really loved it.
I loved the chaos. So I moved to intensive care this year.
And it's a lot of the same patients where they started before I ever saw them on my unit. This is where they began.
But it's definitely a lot. It definitely tests your patience.
When I started at ICU, I was like, I don't think I'm really burnt out. I think I just want to change.
And then a few months in, I was like, oh, I was really burnt out. And I didn't even realize it.
I was so impatient. And it's hard.
You know, they're brain injured. You know, it's not their fault.
You know, they have no control, but they're still saying and doing terrible things all the time. So it's really hard to separate.
Yeah, you have a finite capacity. And then you have a real life outside of it.
And And maybe you're sleep deprived and maybe you're having a marital issue and you add all these things together. It's impossible.
I will say it's prepared you nicely to have a child, though. Yeah, I think so.
My brother and my family, they're not in nursing and I always tell them my crazy stories because they don't live here either. So they wouldn't know any of the people and they're like, how do you do that? And I'm like, honestly like honestly it puts your own life in perspective because you're like man things could always be worse yeah yeah that's true whenever people ask me what working on neuro is like i'm like well i had a man with half a skull and seven point restraints choose catheter out of his penis that is crazy thanks for sharing yeah tori i'm so sorry you're feeling so.
But congratulations on your impending baby time. And it was great meeting you.
And thank you for telling us that story. Yeah, I hope you feel better fast.
Thank you. I would like to do a quick shout out to my sisters.
My sisters also have unique names, so I'm not going to single them out by names. My cousin Kara, I will call out.
She is the world's biggest Armchair Anonymous fan. She listens like every morning at 7 a.m.
And I was so close to calling it today. I knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, but I was like, I can't.
But I was like, she'll kill me. You did great as a nurse would feel better.
Take a nice nap now. And thanks so much for rallying.
Thank you. All right.
Take care. Oh, wow.
Chew your catheter out. Yeah, that's wild.
Yeah, I got a little claustrophobic at the thought of a seven-point harness. Yeah, that's a lot.
But I get it. That happened with my dad when he had this very massive head-on collision when I was in eighth grade.
And I had to go to the hospital. And they said basically go in and say goodbye.
He's unconscious. I went in there and his head was like the size of a basketball.
And he woke up while I was in there and the first thing he did is pulled the breathing tube out. And I was begging him, no, daddy, you need that, you need that.
Oh my God, it was so stressful. That's scary.
God bless the nurses. Yeah, they're incredible.
Again, round of applause. We love them.
We love them. I love you.
Love you. That delivered.
Do you want to sing a tune or something? We don't have a theme song. Oh.
Okay, great. We don't have a theme song for this new show, so here I go, go, go.
We're gonna ask some random questions, and with the help of Armchairies, we'll get some suggestions. On the flyer, I'm Dish.
On the flyer, I'm Dish. Enjoy.
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