Little lost lark
Perhaps the most charming thing about my patients at clinical is the complete and utter unpredictability and wild fluctuations of their day to day lives.
Last week, I spent quite a bit of time chatting with one of my patients, J. He is quite pleasant and cooperative and seems to enjoy company so long as you don't ask him to take a bath or shower. (He hasn't bathed since he was admitted to the place.) All in all, normal guy. The end of my second shift, after 24 full hours of providing for his every nursing need, I wound up talking to a nurse who took care of him last week. "Oh, J?" She asked. "I guess that Haldol [an anti-psychotic med] is really working for him." I asked her what differences she noticed in him. "Well," the nurse replied, "last week he was throwing his poop at the walls."
So J left the facility yesterday at 3:30 pm which wasn't too surprising or concerning at the time. He'd been talking about going back to his old place, about 30 minutes or so from the clinic, to check it out and certainly isn't a prisoner. He never came back last night, which is concerning because the guy's so darn delusional he probably couldn't find his way out of a paper bag so the police were called and they put out a 'be on the lookout'. By the time I arrived this morning, we needed to file a missing persons report. We called the police and were waiting for them to arrive, when my preceptor (nurse) got a phone call from a nurse at the county jail. J had been arrested around 4 in the morning, 30 minutes away from clinic on a charge of public indecency. The jail wasn't too interested in keeping him and it seemed like he wasn't trying to be malicious in his indecency (more likely he couldn't get his pants back up after he peed than that he was flashing little old ladies). So they released him at 4:30 PM and took him to the bus stop that would get him back to the clinic. According to the bus schedule, he should have arrived before 5, but we didn't see hide nor hair of the guy by the time our shift was over at 7:30. The poor guy really is delusional and I'm worried he might have missed a couple doses of Haldol. I hope he finds his way back to the clinic tonight. Just in case though, I'm going to check the jail website again tomorrow - I wonder if he'll get himself arrested again.
The clinic has video cameras and monitors around and on our floor so we can see the front door of the clinic, elevators and so on. Mid-afternoon I noticed a small crowd of staff hovering around the monitor and went to check out the commotion. I saw paramedics wheeling a patient out. This isn't terribly uncommon. The clinic is a skilled nursing facility, not a full-blown hospital. We can provide a lot of care,. particularly for chronic conditions, infections, and so on, but more acute issues - sprained ankle, heart attack, collapse - warrant a trip to the hospital.
I got the full story from my nurse a while later. A patient who's known to be a little crazy came out of the bathroom and told some of the staff that he'd just eaten a live bird. The staff of course didn't believe him, but one went into the bathroom to find two little bird feet and nothing else. Paramedics were called to take the guy to a hospital (to do what? Pump his stomach for bird?) and the guy refused to go. So then the police were called and thus the tableau I witnessed on the security camera.
Last week, I spent quite a bit of time chatting with one of my patients, J. He is quite pleasant and cooperative and seems to enjoy company so long as you don't ask him to take a bath or shower. (He hasn't bathed since he was admitted to the place.) All in all, normal guy. The end of my second shift, after 24 full hours of providing for his every nursing need, I wound up talking to a nurse who took care of him last week. "Oh, J?" She asked. "I guess that Haldol [an anti-psychotic med] is really working for him." I asked her what differences she noticed in him. "Well," the nurse replied, "last week he was throwing his poop at the walls."
So J left the facility yesterday at 3:30 pm which wasn't too surprising or concerning at the time. He'd been talking about going back to his old place, about 30 minutes or so from the clinic, to check it out and certainly isn't a prisoner. He never came back last night, which is concerning because the guy's so darn delusional he probably couldn't find his way out of a paper bag so the police were called and they put out a 'be on the lookout'. By the time I arrived this morning, we needed to file a missing persons report. We called the police and were waiting for them to arrive, when my preceptor (nurse) got a phone call from a nurse at the county jail. J had been arrested around 4 in the morning, 30 minutes away from clinic on a charge of public indecency. The jail wasn't too interested in keeping him and it seemed like he wasn't trying to be malicious in his indecency (more likely he couldn't get his pants back up after he peed than that he was flashing little old ladies). So they released him at 4:30 PM and took him to the bus stop that would get him back to the clinic. According to the bus schedule, he should have arrived before 5, but we didn't see hide nor hair of the guy by the time our shift was over at 7:30. The poor guy really is delusional and I'm worried he might have missed a couple doses of Haldol. I hope he finds his way back to the clinic tonight. Just in case though, I'm going to check the jail website again tomorrow - I wonder if he'll get himself arrested again.
The clinic has video cameras and monitors around and on our floor so we can see the front door of the clinic, elevators and so on. Mid-afternoon I noticed a small crowd of staff hovering around the monitor and went to check out the commotion. I saw paramedics wheeling a patient out. This isn't terribly uncommon. The clinic is a skilled nursing facility, not a full-blown hospital. We can provide a lot of care,. particularly for chronic conditions, infections, and so on, but more acute issues - sprained ankle, heart attack, collapse - warrant a trip to the hospital.
I got the full story from my nurse a while later. A patient who's known to be a little crazy came out of the bathroom and told some of the staff that he'd just eaten a live bird. The staff of course didn't believe him, but one went into the bathroom to find two little bird feet and nothing else. Paramedics were called to take the guy to a hospital (to do what? Pump his stomach for bird?) and the guy refused to go. So then the police were called and thus the tableau I witnessed on the security camera.
posted by Imle at 10:55 PM
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