News >> Browse Articles >> Offbeat
Urban Legends From Our RN Friends
Featured Author:
Max E Nurse
Max E Nurse is NursingLink’s “blogger from across the pond.” He works as a nurse practitioner in the UK and he writes about his experiences at his blog, “It shouldn’t happen in health care.”
Max E Nurse is a bit of a oddity. His experience comes from a series of lost directions.
Max is a Pediatric Nurse who got lost, ended up in the ER, then somehow ended up as a Nurse Practitioner in General Practice.
Max explains where the name comes from:
“The name is not an ego issue, it arises from a debate with Dr Crippins (nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com), who suggested that Nurse Practitioners were forgetting nursing and trying to be mini doctors. To which the response was that we were trying to be Maxi Nurses, not mini doctors. It was Crippin who first led me to blogging, but that doesn’t mean I like him.”
Outside the office Max enjoys family life with lovely wife and gorgeous daughter. He mostly leaves work at work, and blogs in his lunch break.
Add Max as a NursingLink friend
More articles from this author:
Max E Nurse
May 17, 2008
As part of my unending mission to find amusing nursing stories, I recently received an email from Melanie Herson telling a funny nursing story…
About a someone who…”was doing a shift with a student nurse, and looking after a patient on complete bed rest. The student nurse took this word for word & when the patient needed a commode she heaved the commode ONTO the bed & there he sat on the commode on the bed. My friend said she walked down the ward & all she could see was the top of his head peaking over the screens. True story”.
Hmmmm, I’ve heard this before. It is always about a girl who worked with a friend and the tale is never told in the first person.
Quite frankly I find it difficult to believe. Not only would the student have to be bloody stupid, but the patient too. Adding the fact that the Moscow State Circus would find it difficult to balance a patient on a commode on a single hospital bed.
Then taking into account the patient is probably quite unwell if on bed rest and therefore unlikely to be capable of performing such an act, it all seems a little far fetched.
None the less this did get me thinking about other Nursing Urban Legends.
During my training and life in general I have moved about a fair bit, and on occasions you hear the same stories that happened “once” or happened to “a friend of a friend” The commode on the bed is a bit of a classic, it just might have happened once, but as stated, I have my doubts.
The other that springs to mind, is again a student nurse (poor blighters even get blamed for things in fiction), who was advised to clean the patients teeth and so collected up every patients false teeth putting them into soak in one big bowl, and then had difficulty pairing them back up again… I’m not saying this definately didn’t happen but….lets look at what we know.
dogmom
about 1 year ago
8 comments
Very funny - true or not! I can just picture seeing the top of the patient's head over the curtains!Some of these stories start in truth but get exaggerated over the years. I've been hearing the denture story for many years.
I had a friend who was giving an enema to a patient who was hard of hearing and when asking whether he was finished, she shouted, "Did you come yet?!" for all to hear! Although I'm not sure I would have believed it if I had not seen (and heard) it myself!
pezzy
about 1 year ago
392 comments
I don't think it is true either, but an amusing story to say the least!!
Shan4691
about 1 year ago
5312 comments
great article
cdnurse
about 1 year ago
3260 comments
I do not buy the student nurse and denture story either. Even a student on the very first day of clinical would have more sense.
charlita
about 1 year ago
2978 comments
I'd like to hear more! (as for the commode on the bed I don't think so, like you said, it would be almost impossible to balance a commode on a hospital bed even without a patient on it. No one is that stupid! As for the dentures, I think that could have happened .....to a student nurse who was trying to do a good deed and didn't think it through.)