Stories from the Front Lines

I have always liked how nursing has expanded my thinking. Many years ago in nursing school, we had been in the NICU tending to the tiniest of humans, and when we left the area, I saw a covered gurney being pushed toward the morgue. I thought wow...life, its beginning and its ending, is in these walls. And I have continued to be amazed by the different sorts of life that lie between birth and death. Yesterday I helped take care of a rather robust one hundred plus year old man. What stories he could tell!

Often there are funny situations, some of then in print. Looking through a chart today I read something I hope was a typo. "The patient admits to using crack and methamphetamine but rarely alcohol, only three to four drinks a day." Gee I am glad that's not a problem! And in a brochure from a place for the chronic mentally ill was this: "Before (this place) I lived with six people in a two bedroom house. It was so crowded that we had to take turns taking showers." Now they can all shower together, I suppose. And written in the chart as a reason for the admission of a middle-aged woman, "Another stressor was that her 89 year old uncle was making passes at her."

Doctors dictate their assessments and their H&Ps, (history and physical) and they are then typed and placed on the chart, an official record. The beginning of an H&P was in a chart that said the patient's name and a line or two and then in bold caps ... "CANCEL THIS DICTATION." With a transcriptionist like that, who needs enemies!