Doctor and I had to have a VERY serious conversation this morning. We have one patient who, whenever he comes in, is forced by the doctor to give a urine specimen. This man is 97-years-old and blind as a bat. Why on earth he has to do seventy-five-million tests on a 97-year-old is beyond me. You can only imagine where I'm going with this.
For some reason, I am usually the one elected to help him get to the bathroom, get his pants pulled down, and get him sat on the toilet (and I am going to come right out and say I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS. I am sorry, but if I wanted to see naked people, I would have been a nurse or an artist).
I don't know what he does in the bathroom after I step out and close the door. It must be something radical because whenever I go back in to help him get stood up and zipped up, there is urine surrounding the toilet and none actually in the urine collection hat itself. Today, he misunderstood/couldn't hear my instructions and instead of urine, I ended up with diarrhea...EVERYWHERE.
It's a good thing he IS blind because the stench was so bad that I honestly dry-heaved at least three times before I was able to step out to get a fresh breath. I thought I was good to go, but he couldn't find the sink, the soap, or the paper towels, leading to three more trips into the VERY small bathroom.
And, what I didn't realize was that on each trip, I was STEPPING in the diarrhea and tracking it onto the carpet outside the bathroom, therefore distributing the smell in an extremely efficient manner. Nothing like human poo on the bottom of your shoe (which, incidentally, is going to be the title of my first rap album).
As soon as the patient was safely back out in the waiting room, I had to glove up and Clorox the entire bathroom (what a thrill that was).
When the doctor came out of his office, I said, "Doctor, I vote that you never get a urine sample from him again. If you want one, you are going to be the one to clean up after him."
He just laughed and walked away. NOT FUNNY! I am being VERY serious here. Do you understand? VERY SERIOUS.
3 comments:
Ahhh... Erin's blogs. This is the only website I've ever uncovered that can make me dry heave and laugh uncontrollably all at once. Bravo on the descriptive words!
On another note, I heard an interview with the Academy Award winning writer of Juno, Diablo Cody (I know - crazy name!) and she spoke about how she once was a stripper. BUT, she claimed that it was a "sort of experiment" because she wrote a book about it later. That had me thinking about you and your somewhat equally unpleasant job. Maybe you could write a book about it and chalk it up to an experiment.
Is that in your job description? If not, you should find out which job that is and then bill him for the extra hours. :) See if you have to clean poo again.
I'll either bill him for the extra hours or go in there and sling the poo at his head. Either way, I'll feel better.
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