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Urban Legends From Our RN Friends
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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.
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Max E Nurse
May 17, 2008
Generally, ward staff might assist a patient to get ready for bed – sure, and they do ob’s rounds 4hrs T.P.R’s etc. However I can’t imagine anyone coming up with a combination – eg – nurse one washes their faces, nurse two cleans their teeth etc. (nurse three puts a commode on the bed)…
Now for the commode on the bed tale, I did say that whoever invented the story forgot to think about the patient. In generally they are at least partly intelligent creature and would say “What the hell are you doing trying to get me to balance up here?” In the denture story the patient advising the nurse not to walk off with their dentures does seem likely, but would anyone understand the gummy patient saying:
“Mare arb ew goon wib me teep?”
Hmmmm, not convincing.
Now I’m sure there are lots of other Nursing Urban Legends/myths, but none more spring to mind. So feel free to join in…(as always).
Incidentally the story about the student nurse leaving the main ward to get some milk for a patient and not coming back for 30 minutes is true, that was me… We had a special milk fridge (bit like a cool water system, but for milk), the tap came off in my hands, milk started spraying everywhere and I had to pinch the plastic pipe together, and wait for someone to finally wonder where the hell I (or the milk) was.
…and the story about someone trying to kill themselves by jumping out of a hospital window and landing in front of the accident department is also true, I was there too!
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
5402 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.)