I am just curious if anyone else has any fun or informative hospital stories. My experience had a few interesting moments and I am curious if anyone else wants to share theirs?

For me, It was a fun catheter story lol. I am going to be a little forward with this post so hold on to your hats! The PCA came into my room the middle of my first full night in the hospital. She was wanting to fix my catheter. You see there is a clip the goes on the inside of your thigh the holds it in place so it doesn't get snagged on anything and yanked on. I don't know about you but I cringe just thinking about that. Anyway, they forgot to put one on when I was in surgery so the PCA came into my room to do this. This girl was a little on the special side I think.

She lifts up my gown and grabs onto the tube to move it to the side, not the best feeling in the world really, and she slaps this clip onto my thigh. Shen then proceeds to start try to attach the tube to the clip. She is fiddling, fumbling, and tugging around for about 4 minutes and I am sitting there gown up looking at my wife all while shooting her looks like, "I feel like I should be buying her dinner first." I am starting to get a little annoyed though at this point. She then proceeds to say she can't figure it out and will need to get the nurse.

So, with one hand on the tube, all up in the air, she casually uses her phone to call the nurse. We proceed to wait for another 6 minutes with her just hanging on, talking about her day to me, and seeing how my stay was going. I really think she could have just covered me back up and left me alone. Now the nurse comes in to explain to the PCA that she did it wrong and needed to clip it to the tube before she attached it to my thigh. Oh Brother! She it was fixed in a matter of seconds. All this tugging and awkwardness with my wife sitting right there.

It was annoying at the time. By that point in my day I had been through too much to be embarrassed. It actually got fun the next few days when nursing students would come in to do evaluations seeing how awkward and hesitant they were trying to work around everything. I look back now and laugh about the experience though it was annoying at the time. I just wanted to sleep and I am getting all to familiar with my PCA.

LOL so that is my funny story. What is yours?

Didn't enjoy my hospital stay. While I made my laps around the hallways after surgery, there were before-and-after photos strung up on the bulletin boards. Six months later after surgery, I brought them my before-and-after photo to put up on their bulletin boards. http://www.breadandbutterscience.com/Operation.jpg They made me sign a release form before they could use it.

When I was walking the halls after surgery, I went up to the nurses station and asked them what the weight of the largest person they treated with bariatric surgery. They said 600 pounds.

Mine was the morphine pump. I had one with my hysterectomy and they had told me how often I could push it, 30 or 45 minutes apart. After my gastric bypass I remember being in alot of pain and asking how often I could push it, all I heard was every 6 minutes and so I tried to do that. Going in and out of consciousness trying to see the clock, til I was all out. Then I had to wait a couple hours til they could refill. That time I figured out to find out how many doses and how long it was meant to last. Again it was back to 30 to 45 minutes apart. Man was I high that first batch, felt like a goof.

Edited November 6, 201411 yr by smiley922

...er Jonathan... welcome to how a woman feels giving birth... :-) Modesty be damned. I also had a morphine issue. Really loopy that first day or two. At least I never got sick!!!

Yes, my friends and family all laughed at my speech while on the pain drugs.

But. My newfound allergy to dilaudid was the surprise! I could have ripped my skin off.

And, there is no provacy in hospitals! Argh !

I had to use that little bottle of liquid explosion the night before surgery to expel anything and I mean anything in my digestive tract. It just about took my ear wax and sucked my eyelashes right through me too. Just kidding. I then had surgery and still no Water to drink. I awoke around three in the morning ready to get up and walk. As I drug around my catheter bag and IV cart, I asked everyone I saw for water. Begged. I even offered to pay if nurses would slip me some. I started to chant.....WATER.........WATER............ No one felt sorry for me, all they gave me was one of those sponge lollipops. I think that was the most uncomfortable part of the surgery.

No regrets though!

I had to use that little bottle of liquid explosion the night before surgery to expel anything and I mean anything in my digestive tract. It just about took my ear wax and sucked my eyelashes right through me too. Just kidding. I then had surgery and still no water to drink. I awoke around three in the morning ready to get up and walk. As I drug around my catheter bag and IV cart, I asked everyone I saw for water. Begged. I even offered to pay if nurses would slip me some. I started to chant.....WATER.........WATER............ No one felt sorry for me, all they gave me was one of those sponge lollipops. I think that was the most uncomfortable part of the surgery.

No regrets though!

OMG, I miss those sponge lollipops. I would walk the halls with them because I would get such a bad case of dry mouth! Wish I had them at home for when I'm nauseous at home and don't want to drink anymore! I had a family member of another patient come up to me and tell me he kept seeing me pass by her room over and over. I imagine it looked like a horror movie. Nurse said I did 30 laps around the unit my last night there.

Just got released 3 days ago. I was able to get pretty much unlimited ice chips within a few hours of getting settled into my room. The first night, I was so thirsty and the ice was doing the trick except I had the most awful metallic bad taste in my mouth. I was really wishing for something to get rid of the bad taste. I asked the nurse tech who was in my room for one of the many middle of the night visits if there was something I could have. A few minutes later, she came back with a grape popsicle....a real grape popsicle...not even sugar free!! I wondered if I was allowed to eat it, but figured she had checked with my nurse before bringing it in.

About 2 bites in to the popsicle, my door opened and the nurse and tech were heading in. I looked at them and muttered "busted". The nurse came in and took the popsicle away. I had only gotten about two heavenly bites of it before it was confiscated.

It didn't take me long to figure out that the bad taste was being caused by the morphine pump. It got worse each time I pushed the magic button. I stopped pushing that button by mid-morning of the day after my surgery. That was the last time I got any pain meds.

Edited November 12, 201411 yr by gonnawinthisone

I was walking my laps and the Nurse comes up to me and says your gown is open in the back! My robe had caught my gown and my butt was showing....I was so embarrassed! The Nurse said, it's nothing we haven't seen before and we both laughed!

They woke me up on the operating table after my surgery and I had to do some yoga moves to get myself off the table and on to the gurney on to the way to recovery!

Back on the ward I had an opera singer with Alzheimer's. 3 solid days of opera.

Im 9 days Post-Op. Just left my 1st doctor's appt. Had an interesting experience today while there. They removed the tube from my side...OMG! I really went in not knowing what to expect. There was a slight pinch to loosen it. Then the doctor starting pulling the tube from my stomach. It literally felt like he was pulling life from my body. It was a cringing and stinging type pain. Just a very weird feeling, very nauseating. Thought was was going to hurl what little fluid I had in my pouch of a stomach lol.

I had a nurse who thought I shouldn't be getting the amount of IV pain medication prescribed by my surgeon and she wouldn't call him in the middle of the night to double check. That was a fantastic night. It all started when she came in to give me my normal bedtime medications I take at home and as she dispenses them she realizes I take methadone twice a day. I also take hydrocodone, Flexeril, and nortryptilene as part of my pain management program for my back. Well she assumed (and never bothered to ask me about it) that I take methadone as part of a narcotic or illegal drug rehab program. So in her opinion I should absolutely not be getting any narcotics through the IV since she thought I am a recovering addict. The whole night I would cal and ask if I could get something for the pain because I was trying to be active and it hurt like a beast. She kept telling me no and that my doctors orders weren't accurate so they could only give me 1 Tylenol every 6 hours. It was an awful awful night and I was fighting not to cry and just tough it out. This nurse left at 7am and a new one took over. When she reported off to the new nurse she told her I was a methadone clinic patient and was to receive no opioids until the doc made his rounds later that morning. Doc finally came in around 10 and asked me how I am doing and I finally broke down crying because I was in so much pain. We went through the whole did you tell your nurse you need medication and have you let them know how bad the pain was. I explained I had been asking the nurse since 11:20 last night and I was told I could have 1 Tylenol every 6 hours and something was wrong with the orders he wrote but they didn't want to bother you in the middle of the night. He looked puzzled and said he would check on me again later. About 20 minutes go by and the nurse comes hurrying into my room with 2 syringes of medication and a cup of liquid medication and she tells me she is giving me dilaudid, toradol, and hydrocodone liquid . I was so grateful and really confused by this point. I asked what was going on and she explained the whole mix up with my home meds and the nurse's perception of them . I was rapidly falling to sleep but angry! The nursing supervisor them told me I should have questioned my night nurse harder and made her call the doc to verify orders no matter what time it is. Um sure.

So that was my hospital "fun" and I never saw the 1st nurse the next night which is a very good thing!

I'm a cna at a hospital. My hospital does bariatric surgeries but I opted to not see co workers in the hospital, or for them to know what I've done. So I went to a hospital a good 30 minutes away from mine, during my 1st day I had a cna and she asked what I did for a living. I told her what I do and where I work. It turns out that she has a sister in law that I know who works with me regularly. Small world, I tell ya.

Apparently I have very efficient kidneys, who knew! After surgery, I was going to the bathroom about every 15 minutes. They had to unplug everything, remove the pumping leg sleeves from my legs and help me get to the bathroom. By night fall I had gone so many times the nurse decided to reduce my IV fluids. I think they were getting tired of coming to my room for the never ending bathroom trips. At one point an older nurse told me I really didn't need the leg sleeves because I was walking so much to and from bathroom. She too had enough with re-arranging the things. Sometimes they were too tight others not enough. My legs received the most care in my entire hospital stay to the point of being ridiculous.

I remembered another humorous story! My second day there I decided to change my hospital gown. I had some blood on the one I was wearing from surgery and they had left me toiletries, towels, a wash cloth and new gown in my bathroom. I washed as best I could, then started attempting to put the gown on. After five minutes I was exhausted. Couldn't figure the dang thing out!! My friend had surgery the same day so I texted him and asked if his mom could send a nurse down to my room (I basically had one arm in and that was all haha). Then I hear a male voice call my name, crack the bathroom door and it was one of the bariatric surgeons checking on me. It had been about ten minutes at this point and I told him I couldn't figure the gown out so he starts trying to help. After a minute or so he says, "I can perform surgery but I have no clue how to put a hospital gown on!" He grabbed a nurse and she had me buttoned and tied in within about ten seconds. Said she could do it in her sleep. Who knew getting dressed would be so hard!! Lol!

No really funny stories. By the time I had the by-pass it was my third surgery in just over a year. August 2013 to remove my lap band in an emergency surgery, March 2014, first new knee, October 2014 Roux n y by-pass. The good news is I am doing well. Healing well. I also seem to be able to follow the plan, maybe I finally just got smarter.

I am enjoying the funny stories though. I can identify!