With deference to Margie from Fargo, "I think I'm gonna barf!"

Do not read this if you are of a delicate constitution as it will likely prove a mistake. You are warned :)

I have seen quite a few things that would make anyone, myself included, squeamish since I have started school. I have walked with bags filled with human offal, I have cleansed the genitals of the more corpulent amongst us (and the more malodorous), and I have observed a welling pool of urine more blood than urea and more solid than liquid. I will not pretend (even though it is my blog and I am well within my rights to augment myself both mentally and physically) that I have dealt with any or all of it with a smile, but I certainly have tried. Today was a different breed of animal......eh, like a liger or a tigon if they were repellent.

I had the option of working with another student today and, since I am mentally on vacation already I thought why the hell not. She thought the same. Turns out we did not know what we were getting into.

The patient has been on the floor for about a month now. I am learning that acute care spans the time frame between a day and somewhere just south of a year evidently. She was admitted looking something like a burn victim having succumb to some ill effects from a medication she was on. Her husband is a medical doctor, but evidently thought better of taking her in to attend to her problems until two weeks later, hence the severity of her ailments. Her co-morbidities are plentiful and I doubt I will cover them fully here. She has 100 pack years of smoking, severe COPD, she is on oxygen therapy, she has lost better than 60lbs in the past 6 months, she is diabetic, she experiences bouts of psychosis, she is unable to ambulate, she is fed through a peg tube in her stomach, and she is on contact precautions because of ORSA (Oxacillin Resistant Staph aureus). She is presently bedridden and in restraints to keep her from pulling out her feeding tube and/or IV lines. She is also shedding skin.

When I say she is shedding skin I dont mean the kind you see sheaf off your body after too much sunbathing. I mean the type of shedding that you really would have to see to believe. It comes off in sheets and sloughs off constantly. Her skin, despite this, has the tacky texture of a linoleum floor with a three day old soda spill dried upon it's surface. Bathing her yielded a bucket of wrinkled human detritus and putting lotion on her afterward necessitated changing gloves as they gathered up more flecks of skin than a rake would leaves on a fall day. It is probably beyond my words to explain it as vividly as I would like (though it will likely spare you the images I will have for some time). The smell I will leave to your imagination as typing this has proven enough for me.

The counselor told us when seeking employment not to make a list of what we like, but rather to make one of what we do not like. This has shot to damn near the top of that list. Were the profession limited in scope in such a way that this rotation was representative of the whole, I would have removed myself from it by now, but it is no more than merest of fractions of what can yet be. I cannot wait to move on. 2 days until that happy event occurs.