Transcript of Armchair Anonymous: Nurses II

Wndri Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast. 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.

Heroes.

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. You have to be so mentally tough.

Yeah, and positive.

And positive. And funny to get through. I know. It's really special.

We learned a new term 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 it at? Rectum. Foreign body. Rectal Foreign Body.

Foreign Body. Foreign Body. We learned that all nurses have a foreign body and rectum story, which is exciting as all hell. Please enjoy Nurses Part 2. I'm Raza Jeffrey, and in the latest season of to spy who, we open the file on Vitold Pilecki, the spy who infiltrated Auschwitz. Resistance fighter, Vitold Pilecki, has heard dark rumors about an internment camp on his home soil of Poland. Hoping to expose its cruelty to the world, he leaves his family behind and deliberately gets himself imprisoned. The camp is called Auschwitz, a hellish place where the unimaginable becomes routine. Poletski is determined he needs to colonize the prisoners, build a resistance, and get the truth out. Except when the world hears about the horrors of the camp, nobody comes to the rescue. In the end, it's just him alone, with only one decision to make, accept death or escape. Follow the Spy Who on the WNDYRI app or wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Infiltrated Auschwitz early and ad-free with WNDYRI Plus.

I'm Afua Hirsch.

I'm Peter Frankerpen.

In our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history.

This season, we're looking at the life of the most famous Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette.

Her death is seemingly more well known than her life, but her journey from the daughter of the Austrian Emperor to becoming the most hated woman in France is just as fascinating.

We're going to look at the ways in which her story was distorted during the French Revolution and dig deeper into her real experiences in a troubled, difficult time. Marie-antoinette is one of the most well-recognized but least well-understood names in history. We're talking about how her death led to the way that she was spoken about in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Follow Legacy Now from wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hard times, come and go. Good times, take them slow. My life, I had them both. 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 Really, it 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 people.

Well, if you don't laugh, you'll cry.

It's a good attitude.

So goes the adage. Where are you at, Payton?

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. 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 beating around the bush, 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 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 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. Perfect. I just ate.

This is great. Immedient infection smell. Infection smell is such a bad combo of words.

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

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 a little essential oil sticks.

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

I did say that?

Yeah, you did. If you tried that.

I'll try that the 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 the cuteest little five-foot-Monica type old grandma. For sure, but she's old. 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? 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 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 and her brain. You can see grandma's brain? No.

We can see granny's brain.

Her brain.

We're like, All right, there we go. Bingo.

Apparently, brains stink. Now we know. It is very clearly infected.

It's red. It doesn't look well. Am I right to assume that's the last thing you want infected?

Definitely. She was off in all the ways.

What happens if the scarf comes off and you go, You can't I hope 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. You're not watching Pulp fiction. You're only human. Yeah. We're like, Have you been taking care of it?

She's like, I was taking pretty good care of it.

I keep this 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 this scarf off at night, and then my cats like to lick it. Stop it. Yes. This is the nasty-Nurses have all the dettes.

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 mittons happy. And also she didn't do her research.

Cats love human brains. They eat them.

Will they eat their face? 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 Mitten's was like, She's on her way out. I got to have a slice.

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. 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 getting in there. Because someone needed to go in there surgically and get rid of this necrotic flesh and everything. And drain all the cats alive. Pull the cat babies out of her. Don't say cat babies in a brain.

Oh my God. Mittons, kittons. She was like, Baltimore.

You know what?

What's his name's wearing the scarf, and then he takes off in Voldemort's there.

Yes, Professor Quirle. I literally was thinking that. It's literally that. Oh my God.

You never know what someone's hiding under there.

What was her spirit? She sounds very nice. She She was the sweetest little lady. So cookey. 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.

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 This is rough.

At this hospital, we had a lot of frequent fliers, and I never saw her again.

Okay. 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 mittons 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.

Payton, 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.

I 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.

Do you think that's Laura's dream in life? No, don't say that. To have her brain licked by her cat. Probably. This is what happens with people who love cats.

They love them way too How much? It's 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 Munchhausen by proxy, from Andrea Dunlop.

I don't have Munchhausen, I 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 inflecting Munchausen's on your child.

I'll wait for that prompt for sure.

Well, a delightful meeting both of you.

Good luck down there in Virginia. Thank you very much. Thank you.

So nice to meet you.

All right. Bye. Hi. Hello. Is this Lucy? Yes, it is.

How are you doing? Have we caught you at work?

Yes, I'm at work in a nice fancy little telephone booth. 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 I live the bedside now, so I'm in healthcare education and simulation. 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 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. What Slitter against foot, never a good thing. I've done some travel nursing, too, in small urban cities to fly-in/fly-out communities.

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 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. This would be the one year 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 health care providers, sure. But not a layman.

Not for civilians. Small town emerge. 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 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, you're writing it down. So that's a whole other added layer that people don't love. Yeah. Hey, everyone.

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The physician goes in to 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 a little callback, this person biked in. Right. Oh, my God. Yeah. All I can imagine hearing this is every petal revolution is 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.

But we're a rural hospital. You try and get creative with what you have. Babies do get delivered here, and there are vacuum-assisted devices 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 is 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 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 the imaging was there's free air on the X-ray, which means something might have perforated.

There's more severity there that you don't want to mess around with, rurally. Then also, if you were just to simply pull it out, it creates a vacuum. You maybe got to fill air around it. You might have to be inflating, basically, as you pull it out. Or have another hole it elsewhere to help prevent a vacuum and have all the intestines come with it. 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. A lot of times people don't necessarily come back for a discharge or anything like that.

Usually when they go, that's the last time we'll see them.

I'm going to guess. I mean, his bike is there. Yeah. The next day, he came back in to 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. 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 procedure he had. Obviously, it 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 a HIPAA issue. They couldn't call the next household 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.

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. It got up there.

It's the classic slip and fall. Yeah, classic. 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.

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. If 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-sad 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'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? Yeah. That's even worse. Well, Lucy, this has been incredible.

I 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 you 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. Bye. What does bottom of my heart?

The depths of my heart, the deepest part.

But the deepest part, I feel like, is this 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, 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 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 watch that talk.

You already told me the whole talk.

It was Abraham Lincoln.

Yes. No, I'm just kidding.

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 something?

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 Darro 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.

That's a bummer.

I feel like that's more substantive.

Yeah, it's more pure. 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 word. 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 Cedar Sinai. The main difference between a level one and a level two is that they have neurosurgery 24 hours a day in house. 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. Then down to level four, it just really is resources that are available at that specific facility. 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 Every 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 51: 50 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 responsible for those patients until they get to a psychiatric facility, which sometimes that can be days that they're in our emergency department.

Is protocol to, for lack of a better word, anesthetize them? Do you want to get them on some benzo to calm everyone down?

It depends on their level of how violent they are. If you come in and just say, Hey, 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 We've 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. 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.

Oh my God.

With seven or eight psychiatry.

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 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. As the ER nurses do, our team figures it out. A lot of times for disasters, we'll put up tents out in the parking lot. 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. While trying to maintain all of the other patients, getting them out safely, 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. We get them all outside. Everything comes together perfectly. There's enough people to watch. We quarantined the psychiatric patients to one area. We had security guard. 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. We're like, What exactly happened here? Why did we so quickly make this decision? 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 coworker.

Oh my God.

There was really no way to verify this because they didn't release the 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.

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 them 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 being in and out of the chaos. Yeah.

Well, they say that about person is 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?

The patients that were on a ventilator at the time, there's two options. 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 manage that. But yeah, those are things that go into our head. We do disaster drills throughout the year and set up the tents and practice what we would do in that scenario. 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 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 We're not going to live.

What? We're not going to live in LA? Or are they going to shut down hospitals?

Just do it.

Okay, I'm just not sure what thing we're going to... We're afraid to leave LA?

I just don't want to go to the hospital.

We're knocking down because LA has so many good hospitals. I just don't want to go there.

Don't ask questions. Just do it. Wow, that's wild.

Oh, ma'am, 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. Do you have a foreign object in rectum story?

I have many.

Well, you were in LA. 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. I've seen candlesticks.

Sure. That one makes sense.

Wooden candlesticks, though. They didn't choose the wax one. Like a fake decorative candlestick, which then splintered and punctured their colon self I could talk about those stories for days.

Shit, maybe we need our own prompt for nos. Just foreign- Oh, rectal. 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 have, and thank you so much for your job.

You guys are doing great work. Keep it up.

Thank you. We will. Thank you so much. You, too. All right, be well.

Bye.

I can't believe I missed him at Mahru. That's sad.

Foreign body and rectum. I feel like we're just going to get weird submissions, hopefully.

Well, no, someone had someone else's foreign body in their butt.

Oh, like a body part?

We would have to say medical.

I'd like to open it up to everybody. Because maybe someone will be brave enough to tell their foreign body in 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.

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 the sickest I've ever been in my life. I'm pregnant and I got neurovirus, and I'm 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 people, and all eight of us got it. So I'm with you. I'm in the neuro camp currently.

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, 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.

I'm so sorry. You look like Phoebe Wallerbridge. She's very attractive. She is. She's beautiful.

Thank you. From Fleabeg. Can I get started? Yes.

Let it Okay.

For patient confidentiality reasons, I won't give you specifics on where I'm from, where the story took place, but 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 health care. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. That's just 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 a 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. 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 where I'm from. We do have a really bad epidemic of gang violence here. Oh, really? Yeah. A lot of the Prairie And my hospital is the level one trauma center for our province, so we get to see it all. You get to see some horrific senseless acts of violence and assault. Really sad, really awful, but medically, I got to say, you get to see some pretty cool stuff.

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. This man, a middle-aged guy, he was an ex-con who was beaten head 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. Usually, when that happens, we see it all the time, take off usually a front piece, a side piece. If the person is 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, swishy brain. This man, in particular, just the location of his injuries, the back of his head on 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.

I It bothers some people. It's for their safety. It's for our safety. It's temporary. They have tubes they could 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 This man was also heavily restrained, depending on the level of their injury and 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. He was in what we would call seven-point restraints. He had a belt around his waist. He had this piece of fabric that comes up like a diaper that attaches to the waist, and it keeps him from sliding down in bed, getting strangled by it. Seen before. He had both of his wrists restrained, both of his ankles restrained to the bed. Then he was so wild and headbutting that he had a chest strap on. 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, like giant puffy oven mitts that are like Velcroed to their hands. They It didn't grab or squeeze or scratch or anything. So it's just 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. Oh, my God. It's really awful, but I like it to picture just a rabid rescue animal in a cage. They don't know what's going on. They're just fighting you. That was this man, to this day, one of the most wild ones I've looked after. The shift that this happened was on a night shift. I was new, and my partner was new. Her and I had both been on this job for maybe a few months, and it's in an observation room. There's four patients, there's two nurses. It's close observation. It's intended for really sick patients or really wild thrashy patients that you need to have eyes on at all times.

Our nursing station is 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 1: 00 in the morning. The lights are all off because it's night time. We want them all to sleep. 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. I turn the light on and I see that it's urine. That's a bit unusual because he has a catheter in.

Yeah, right.

I could see he's covered up in a blanket still. I could see the catheter tubing's coming out as it should be. It's secured to the bottom of the bed, the bag as it should be. I'm like, Where is this urine coming from? I Yes, 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 a balloon on the end?

Yes, I figured you would know, Dax. Have you had a catheter?

Thank God, no. I have. 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 balloon to two-thirds the size of a golf ball, and it's just to keep it in place. So then if someone accidentally or purposely 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. Oh, no. That is the first thought imaginable.

I know, especially for men. It's atrocious, and it's a blood bath when it happens.

That is immediately my next thought is 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 sitting on his bed between his legs, but the balloon is deflated, which is good. I'm just processing this as I'm seeing it. I'm like, well, I guess he didn't rip it out. But I noticed that the side port is gone. What I realized because he had the chest strap on, but his head of 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?

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

That was a few months on the job. Oh, boy. That was my introduction to nursing and neuro-nursing.

Do you ever get to see the people when Can 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 wheeling himself around the unit and 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 care his whole life.

But he wasn't aggressive?

No. Oh, God. He was just a big child. But yeah, you do get to see them recover even in their time on our unit, which is so fulfilling.

Yeah, it must be.

Wow.

That's crazy.

That is crazy. 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 were 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. 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 patients. When I started at ICU, I was like, I don't think I'm really burnt out. I think I just want to change. Then a few months in, I was like, Oh, I was really burnt out, and I I didn't even realize it. I was so impatient. 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. Maybe you're sleep-deprived, and maybe you're having a marital issue, and you had 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. They're like, How do you do that? I'm like, Honestly, it puts your own life in perspective because you're like, Man, things could always be worse.

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 chews catheter out of his penis.

That is crazy.

Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, Tori, I'm so sorry you're feeling so ill, but congratulations on your impending baby time. 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 Armtour Anonymous fan. She listens every morning at 7: 00 AM, 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 Thank you.

All right.

Take care. Bye.

Oh, nurses.

Choo 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 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 know a theme song.

Okay, great. We don't have a song song for this new show, so here I go, go, go. We're going to ask some random questions, and with the help of our Jerry's, we'll get some suggestions. On the fly, I rindish, on the fly, I rindish. Enjoy. Follow Armchair Expert on the WNDRI app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now by joining WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wndri. Com/survey.