Lurker > Uglybass69

I am sorry you're going through this, it may have been addressed but what country are you living in?

RISEofCHRISTIAN posted...

Are you:

18 years old or under 35 (X, just hit 35)

No mental or psychiatric disorders, or other medical disorders in general (O)

Not color blind (O)

Have a clean criminal record (O)

Not obese (O)

Not addicted to drugs (?, does World Wrestling Entertainment count?)

Thank you for your response!

Im 36 and I was in the Navy from 2010-2015. I am eligible to enlist or even comission, but my shoulder is on the brink of falling apart and my lower back kills me after running so I'm sure it wouldn't last long before an injury got me discharged. If I was in a desk job and had some serious PT waivers then yeah I could probably be in it for awhile longer.

DKBananaSlamma posted...

Are you more used to death now that you did the job longer or is it still tough on you? >_>

Its still sad when someone you got to know well dies, but it doesn't weigh heavy on my soul or make me depressed constantly. Yes, I'm used to death but there's solace in knowing they aren't suffering anymore. Death in the hospital was usually a lot harder because it wasn't the "goal".

gunplagirl posted...

How do you wash the smell of death off? Not like, what you wash with. But rather, how can you go home knowing what you've seen and knowing you'll be right back at it over and over. How do you keep that from lingering on you?

Death happens to all of us whether we like it or not. Most people only really experience death up close when their family or loved ones pass away, either naturally or by accident, so it can be pretty traumatic and jarring. When you work in the ER/ICU/Ambulance etc... you see it all; traumatic deaths, peaceful ones, sudden, abrupt and sad ones. It's all part of the circle of life and death is as much a part of medicine as any other aspect.

I feel like I am actually helping this group of patients more than I did in any other part of medicine I've been in. I am making their final days on earth comfortable and they aren't dying in in pain or agony, and usually with their loved ones around them. Of course it's sad to see someone pass away that you've been following for months and got to know them well, but I know that I helped them be comfortable and I can sleep well at night with that. I couldn't sleep well when I had to tell the families of a 45 year old father that COVID has ravaged his body and he wouldn't survive off the ventilator and there's nothing more we could do. He didn't die comfortably or with dignity, he was unconscious from sedation and couldn't say his final goodbyes.

CassandraCroft posted...

Shouldn't this be moderated for spam?

Anyway on topic I am too old. I wear glasses, I am British and why would I want to join the rubbish US Military. Britain has the best Military service in the world.

I'm not a recruiter, I'm not like messaging people to NIOJ EHT YVAN if they answer yes.

Mia_K97 posted...

Yes, but I'm not enlisting

In Russia, they enlist you!

DirkDiggles posted...

My mom was a nurse for 25+ years. Her last nursing job was a hospice nurse. She absolutely hated it and gave her mental issues and had to retire.

I'm sorry to hear that. After working ICU during peak COVID I really like the change of pace and I feel like I'm actually helping people now. I guess if you're someone who gets really attached to people it can be hard to see them pass over and over. I don't mean to sound like a psycho and I don't care, I guess I just see it differently and I would rather help people pass peacefully or keep them comfortable when theyre terminal than constantly doing mostly futile care
with insane interventions in the hospital

VampireCoyote posted...

In your experience do people generally die peacefully? I kind of hope I just go in my sleep tbh

Yes, they have usually accepted their fate and pass without much distress. They are usually not very sound of mind at the time of passing and it's a progression from semi-coherent lucidity to axonal breathing, to death. Families are sad but usually accepting and thankful it could happen in their home and not in a hospital bed alone.

Evening_Dragon posted...

How many times have old people confessed to you of the ancient crimes they got away with? How often did it involve killing a human?

One guy is a former hit man in the Minnesota Mafia and he went to prison for killing his ex-wifes lover. He got out after a few years and he will tell me some wild mafia stories. Bound to a wheelchair but keeps his nails pristine and is actually a pretty nice guy, but he has killed countless people lol.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Depends on the company really. Everyone is happy with their job where I'm at. We all usually put in about 4 hours a day and that's full-time salary. Only have to go into tye office for supplies or pick up paperwork otherwise the bosses do not bother you at all. We have a good system set up so most patient deaths happen pretty peacefully and thats a good death, as grim as that sounds.

Tyranthraxus posted...

How many people die alone (best guess %)

Maybe 10-15% they could be in a nursing home or assisted living and pass away overnight. If theyre at home family will usually be there, or might wake up find they passed in their sleep. Usually if they're in nursing homes you can get family there before the final moments but but always. We will be there if we get there in time, sometimes it's fast sometimes it takes a few days of shallow breathing and slowly fading.

Smackems posted...

My grandma is on hospice and isn't at the end of her life and doesn't have less that 6 months or a year

Its not the only qualification, but its a major one. You can be put on hospice if you don't want to pursue more aggressive treatments for a disease that could take longer than six months or if they are in mid-late stages of dementia. We have had some people on for 2 years.

KaZooo posted...

Can only wonder how that goes, whether or not you every really get used to things.

I remember the hospice nurse for my dad. I guess she had to go through the formality of asking him if he wanted morphine with his water. He turned it down, but when she was getting the water and cup near me, she told me she had to do so anyway because of how much coughing was escalating with his lactic acidosis.

Just crazy that things like this, is supposed to be a day in and out job.

I saw much worse things in the hospital in the ICU than I see in hospice. People that are brain dead being kept alive by machines when they will die immediately if taken off of them, but family drag their feet any they stay on them for months and months and there's no dignity in it. I am OK with someone passing peacefully, but after the 50th or so non-peaceful passing I saw in the ICU I couldn't do it anymore.

People like to be stoic and play down their pain until it gets really high and difficult to bring it down, that's why we want to try to keep them on a baseline dose so it doesn't get extreme.

g0ldie posted...

have you ever had someone come into your care, and for whatever reasons, end up living a much longer life than everyone was expecting?

like, you might hear about them/from them after they've left, and were doing better years later?

That's like a quarter of our patients, Maybe a little less. They come in with a diagnosis of COPD or heart arrhythmia, something that isn't metastatic cancer and they're pretty rough when we get them, but after a few months they make some improvements, then it's a year and they don't need our services anymore. They can go on to live many more years. It's not the norm but it happens frequently.

cjsdowg posted...

First thank you for what you do, you are needed.

How in the heck can you do that job ( in good way). I was thinking about getting a job at a hospice and just thinking about my grandmother in one of those things I just couldn't do it. Just going for the interview every door I passed , I knew it person with a family and their family member was not going to leave. Even typing this is messing me up. So once more thank you.

Its really not all doom and gloom. Only a handful of patients are actually actively on their deathbed and will die in a few days at any given time, the rest of them can maybe move around fairly well, have their wits to them and are happy to see us because we actually treat their discomfort and pain not just try and edge around giving any "strong" meds. Death is inevitable, we try to help them go through the process in a comfortable place like their own home so they aren't just suffering at the end of their life. You don't see hospice patients suffering, that's a big change compared to the hospital

Hospice is end of life care , or "potentially" end of life care. We don't cause death to happen slower or quicker, we just make people more comfortable when they get a terminal diagnosis (less than 6 months to live), be it through strong ass drugs or getting them equipment to make their lives easier to move around and not suffer. Sometimes people are on it for over a year and come off, their cancer goes into remission or they are in less pain for whatever condition and don't need our services.

MAR10_KarT posted...

I'm eligible but I don't know if I'm in shape enough to pass boot camp

They'll get you into shape. Lots of people go in bery unfit and cam run 3 miles easily by the end.

MC_BatCommander posted...

Is mayonnaise a drug?

No but it could lead to obesity

Yeah I'm pretty down with the sickness on those days.

Are you:

18 years old or under 35

No mental or psychiatric disorders, or other medical disorders in general

Not color blind

Have a clean criminal record

Not obese

Not addicted to drugs

Thank you for your response!

One of the greatest to ever spit live.

I also never got COVID after working with the sickest of the sick for two years. I don't plan on ever getting it, thus I am now a hermit.

trappedunderice posted...

It's only medical in my state while in others on the same land for years now people can legally walk into a shop and buy some green no problem. Fucking ass backward misery is a shit state.

You can buy perfectly legal Delta-9 gummies in every state. The hemp farm bill has a loophole that allows people to derive THC from hemp in concentrated form and put it in a gummy so that by dry weight it's still less than .3% THC, but still actual get you high, not delta-8,10 or whatever other THC, just the straight up real deal. Look up "hemp derived delta 9" and you can get 10mg gummies sent to your doorstep, totally legal.

FLAMING EVIL HOMER posted...

Can you do nursing not in the ICU?
What were your patient to nurse ratios at your jobs?

I do med-surge/Neuro, and its terrible but the patients aren't near ICU level most of the time.

I'd rather not go back to med-surg ever again. When I was doing med-surg it was usually between 5-7 patients a shift, not counting discharges and new admits. It felt like adult daycare most of the time and I was just constantly busy. In the ICU I just had my two patients and while it was a lot to manage, I liked that they didn't talk or pull of their IVs and complain about everything. I'd take a sedated vented patient over someone hitting the call light every 5 minutes to tell me their water is too cold or is missing a single ice chip. We never had techs or CNAs, nobody wants to do that awful work for less than they would make at Target.

I did this for over two years. I decided if I was going to go through this much emotional punishment I should get paid the big bucks and travel nurse. I went to Maine in the dead of winter (January of this year) after being in Texas and it SUCKED. I made a lot of money but even though I was on an ICU contract, they had too much ICU staff most days so I usually got put into the IMC, or progressive care unit; people too sick for the regular floor but not sick enough for the ICU. Basically every patient I had was going through alcohol or opiate withdrawal with COVID on top of some other conditions, constantly on the border of getting intubated but constantly belligerent and I had more punches thrown at me there than I had my entire time working as a nurse. I finished my contract miserably, the winter was brutal as hell and the place I was staying cost over $2k a month.

I haven't worked since March 1st and I don't know what I'll do now. I do not want to go back to a hospital floor, I am terrified of it. I watched over 60 people die in front of me, some violently some peacefully, and usually it was just me in the room holding an iPad so their family could say their final goodbyes through a screen.

99% of them were not vaccinated. 99% of them still would never get the vaccination and would tell me that with their dying breath if they were able to.

We would prone them because being on your stomach helps your lungs expand further. At the facility I worked at the longest they didn't have functional hoyer lifts on the ceiling so we would gather a group of 7 people, roll them up into a sheet and physically flip them from their back to stomach. Most of these people weighed over 250lbs, some as high as 400, 500lbs. Their oxygen sat and ABG would improve on their stomachs but would usually go back to being crappy on their back. You had to flip them at least every 12 hours.

They would have a central venous line usually running a minimum of 4 different IV drugs or fluids, the ventilator in their throat, and an oral pharyngeal tube going to their stomach to give them nutrition and oral meds, a foley catheter for their urine and if they weren't constipated for days and days, a tube up their butt to collect their feces.

Eventually blood clots start to become a real problem, then their kidneys start to fail and it all starts to go downhill until they are on CRRT but it usually isn't enough. Their lungs are scarred beyond repair after weeks of being on the vent and COVID wrecking their lungs that even if they do survive, it's months and months of recovery just to be able to walk a few feet with supplemental oxygen.

The average stay for a patient was about 2-3 weeks until they either died, got off the ventilator and could be downgraded, or they got a tracheostomy and a PEG tube (feeding tube going directly to their stomach) and sent to a LTAC where they may be living on vent support the rest of their lives.

I've had to counsel a guys son in his 30s on how we will transition his father to comfort care (removing the vent and stopping all meds other than morphine) with the phone wedged between my shoulder and cheek as I am putting a 32 year old former EMT into a body bag after he got put on comfort care earlier that day too.

A hospital floor can't permanently be a COVID ICU, but the ones I worked in basically were since March of 2020. Most patients were older men (50+) that just simply couldn't breathe. After a day or two of trying to put them on BiPAP or Airvo (heated high flow nasal cannula), they would still start to get hypoxic and confused, ripping off their oxygen, trying to stand up and leave saying there's things in the room when there weren't, they NEED water, then eventually trying to throw punches (sometimes succeeding) until intubation was necessary.

Once intubated they were usually very difficult to keep sedated with fentanyl, versed, ketamine, propofol, the works, so they would have be put on a chemical Paralytic so they would stop overbreathing the vent and let it do the work for them. You have to monitor their brainwave form using a BIS monitor to make sure they weren't conscious. It's a terrible fate to have every muscle paralyzed and be aware of it but unable to do anything about it, they need to be VERY sedated.

Why does every prayer warriors Facebook boomer meme posting diehard Christian eventually end up dying from COVID-19?

We shall abstain from imbibing on the chemical that is causing the corruption and downfall of the United States, forming a coalition of sober, non-cannabinoid users that seek enjoyment through means such as sewing, singing and pottery.

Thank you for your abstinence

He went bonkers m8.