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6 True (and Funny!) Stories From Real Nurses

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Scrubs Magazine

Scrubs Magazine is the lifestyle website for and about nurses. Here you’ll find weekly giveaways, “best of” lists, and both the lighter side and the serious side of nursing with cartoons, scrubs style DOs and DON’Ts, beauty, health and wellness. Scrubsmag.com also features revealing stories from nurse bloggers ranging from a newly minted nurse to a seasoned RN to a misunderstood male nurse. Follow us on Twitter and join our conversation on Facebook.

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Have you ever seen anything so big?

James is 87, the sweetest of patients, one of nature’s gentlemen. Just the other day when I was giving James a sponge bath I stood him up next to the bed so I could wash his privates when he looked down and said, “Have you ever seen anything so big?”

I didn’t know what to tell him. All I could think of was there was this guy down in Florida one time…

But before I could say a word James shook his head and said, “My brother-in-law told me once that these have got to be the biggest damn feet he has ever seen!”

Egg on my face

I was assigned to care for a young man who had been shot three times. He had no life threatening injuries but certainly severe wounds. I barged into his single room to ask if he’d completed his menu for the following day to find him standing gingerly beside his bed using a urinal. To cover any embarrassment he might feel, I blurted out an old Australian expression: “Oh! The sights you see when you haven’t got a gun!” Needless to say, I blushed!

Pain assessment

I was triaging a patient in L & D who I thought to be going into labor. Doing the pain assessment, I asked her, “Is your pain intermittent or constant?”

“What?”

“Does your pain come and go or is it constant?”

“Well, it constantly comes and goes!”

Strange diagnosis

A first year student in her first month of clinicals in a general surgery ward gave this report of her patient to her clinical instructor:

“My patient Mr. X is a 45-year-old gentleman who has been diagnosed to have a calcium stomach.”

The instructor was confused as she had never heard of a calcium stomach. When she opened the patient’s history sheet, it turned out to be carcinoma – Ca Stomach.