The key contribution of healthcare professionals to society’s well-being is something that most would agree on. And while the majority of people have visited hospitals on occasions varying from the birth of a child to a life-saving operation, there are many things that patients and visitors tend to not know about.
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The lab. The many labs inside a hospital are what you don’t know about.A hospital without a lab is just a bunch of people guessing. A hospital without a lab is a collection of doctors' offices.Think about that for a moment.The lab is not where they draw your blood. The lab is where that blood is sent to have various tests. Each color tube does something very specific. Those tubes need to be filled to a certain amount. They need to be drawn in a certain order to keep contamination from causing issues. Sometimes, they even need to be drawn from certain places.The lab takes your blood, sweat, urine, fluid drainage (from cysts, wounds, around your heart/lungs/liver, brain, etc.), nose swabs, cheek swabs, feces, tumors, removed organs and appendages, growths, and many other unwanted parts and fluids. The lab knows that you eat too much sugar, you lie about that cigarette you enjoy every day, and that you need to stop taking so many over-the-counter pain relievers.The lab knows when you have chemotherapy. The lab watches your platelet count go down. The lab knows about the deletion of that one gene or the doubling up of another. The lab ran your PCR COVID test and saw you become a statistic. They then asked a blood donor program to hit you up for COVID convalescent plasma, so that you might save a life.The lab monitored your time on the heart-lung machine. The lab knew when you needed platelets and blood.The lab saw your lupus diagnosis first. The lab was nearly as upset as you were about it.The lab was overjoyed when they got the news to pass along to your doctor that the stem cells came in for your bone marrow replacement.Nurses and doctors see you face to face, but the lab knows you from your insides. The lab is faceless to almost everyone in the hospital (even other staff), which is a shame because the lab is cheering you on in your recovery.
People abusing nurses and when the nurses report it nothing happens. Nurses deserve safety and the attackers deserve accountability
In the ICU you spend a lot of time keeping corpses alive until their family comes around or their body gives out“Oh Jesus ain’t ready for her yet!”Yes, Jesus is ready for her; we’re just actively delaying it
Sometimes when people die we just put an oxygen mask on them and wheel them through the corridors. Less distressing for other patients and visitors to think they are asleep rather than see a body with a sheet over it.
Some families reject death so much, they beg the doctors and nursing staff to do lifesaving measures on their 95 year old grandma who has cancer everywhere and is begging for death. It’s just unacceptable.
An ambulance ride is not a one way ticket to the front of the line. You still get triaged and could be rolled right to the waiting room if you’re non-emergent.
Wheelchair jousting with towel wrapped crutches do happen on nights.
Not hidden, per se, but for the love of all that is holy, if you insist on bringing your kid into the hospital, do NOT let them crawl or play on the floor. The amount of literal blood, urine, poop, and vomit that has been on it and hastily (not thoroughly) cleaned up is, well, a lot. The hospital, especially the floors, is NOT a clean environment.Added to that, think of all the rooms nurses, doctors, housekeeping staff, etc. have walked into. Rooms that have COVID or Norovirus or group A Strep. We walked into those rooms and those same shoes walked into other rooms.Tl;dr hospital floors are disgusting as f**k.
Surgeon here. We listen to music in the OR. Most people seem surprised when they hear that.
If you come into the ER drunk there is guaranteed a pool of bets on your blood alcohol level, possibly with odds if there’s a pharmacist available to do the math for us.
Imagine being stuck in a windowless white environment with bright florescent lights, beeping machines, pained moaning, and poop smells for 12 hours. Now do it with less staff than what’s required to manage the volume of people. Now throw in 3 years of burnout from the pandemic.Now consider how grumpy and frustrated you would be, and consider what would make you stay in the job.
It’s not uncommon for families to abandon elderly members at the hospital. They will straight up ghost or at least will be polite enough to say they won’t give any assistance to us in placing them in a nursing home, so Adult Protective Services will get involved and make them a ward of the state. This process can take weeks to months, so these abandoned people just live in the hospital and take up the resources that could be used treating sick people.There are also many families that keep elderly members in unsafe living conditions so they can continue to take their Social Security checks for personal use.
I got a fast bleep (ie. drop everything you’re doing and attend this emergency please) one night to a side room on the ward to find no patient in the bed. Was just about to leave the room and go back out to the nurses station, where there had been a bit of a hubbub when I’d dashed past the first time, when something caught my eye.Looked up to see a face with wide, slightly wild “psych eyes” peering down at me from a gap in the ceiling tiles. She was a lady waiting for a bed in the psych hospital who’d clearly thought the ceiling was the best place to hide from the people trying to poison her.Honestly can’t think of another occasion that I’ve been quite so terrified.Worst thing was that I had to walk (well, dash) back out underneath her to get help from the nurses and security to get her down.
How often we have to hide how we are made to feel.Patients blame staff for systemic issues. It’s not your nurses fault the wait time is long, it’s not the individual staff that created the big picture issue. Most of us are trying our best in an unappreciated field and are here trying to help.
That all the sweet treats and food you bring in for the units to eat usually only go to day shift and night shift gets left out of yummy goodness.
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I help patients to the bathroom nonstop all day. The amount of patients that just leave the bathroom without washing their hands is disgusting. If I didn’t hear the sink or soap dispenser your a*s is getting led right to an alcohol hand station
Not really hidden and kinda minor but I’ll say it anyways. I deliver food to patients and it’s not hard to tell when someone is on their way out. Could be simply not being hungry, or could be the inability to eat. Had one patient who hadn’t eaten anything off their tray for 3 days straight. The last time I delivered to them, they smiled and gave me a wink. Next day, they were gone. It’s rough seeing these things happen in real time. I’m a grown a*s man who doesn’t cry often, but it always leaves me feeling extra empty picking up the untouched trays and replacing them with another tray that I know will stay untouched as well.
Just because the person seeing you is professional in the room about your weird issue doesn’t mean they aren’t walking out of there and telling other staff members all about that person that slipped on a bottle and it went in their a*s. No names are used to avoid HIPAA violations but chances are within an hour the entire floor will know about it.
I haven’t seen it on here yet, may have missed it but I’ll add.You, as a patient, have every right to refuse any test or treatment or even leave. At any time. For any reason. (Unless a harm to self or others- that’s different, at least in the US) Added bonus you should know: leaving against medical advice DOES NOT mean insurance will not pay for the care you’ve received. Your insurance will still be billed the same as anyone else who stayed the whole time till discharge.But if you leave with an IV in your arm we will call the police to find you and bring you back to remove it, because of [substance] abuse..
More often than not, they’re beyond short staffed.
There is sex and drama, but not in a Grey’s Anatomy way…more of an overgrown high schoolers shoved together in really stressful situations way. And not as much sex as Grey’s…though maybe I’m just ugly and not in on the scene
Hospital lab worker here - Not particularly scandalous, but most people don’t realise their lab tests are just very accurate guesses, and have an error range. When we say your ‘X’ is 10g/L, we might actually mean it’s 10g/L ± 10-20%.I see too many people get extremely worked up about small fluctuations in blood test values that aren’t actually in excess of the reference change value, and so technically aren’t genuinely different from a previous value.EDIT: If you’re interested, have a little play with this tool to see how variability affects things!DOUBLE EDIT: Also, inter-lab variability is a big problem! Check out this inter-lab comparison data for oestradiol. Identical copies of 3 samples sent to 230 labs around the UK and tested using all our various different machines. As you can see, none of us could agree on an answer, only that the true value was ‘Somewhere between 100 and 200, probably about 130’.
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The hospital I work at has these big square covers. When I first started, I would see transport staff pushing these things around the halls. I thought they were food trays, or large boxes of hospital equipment. Turns out it’s a structured bed cover, so when they are transporting a deceased patient to the morgue, it doesn’t look like a person under a sheet.
Someone died in the bed you’re sitting in
I know one. I used to manage hospital laundry services. Medical waste (body parts etc) gets accidentally thrown in the laundry more often than you’d expect. Also needles and all sorts of other medical devices and personal items. Once we even had a (deceased) fetus come through to the sorting facility.
THE NURSES HAVE NO CONTROL OVER YOUR FOOD TRAYS.
In most older hospitals, the pharmacy is just a couple of feet away from the morgue.
As a hospital social worker, a lot of people think “home care” is going to include an insurance covered home health aid. There is no such thing. You have to private hire or get sent to a nursing home for “rehab.“The staff gossip about all the patients' families. It is easy to get labeled aa needy or difficult.Bringing in food for the staff goes a long way.
The updates you get from the OR while your family member is on the table are BS. The case could be going really bad and the OR nurse will still tell you “everything is going great”
We have mice in the lab, and they’re not for experimentation
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