Toxic Shock

Last night at work, we had one of those experiences that are extremely difficult to explain to readers. The reason for this is that smell-a-vision has not yet been invented. I can tell you from personal experience that smells are the worst part of working with people, more so for me as I have an extra-sensitive sense of smell. While riding in my car with the windows rolled up and the AC on re-circulate, I am often bothered by the obnoxious odor of people smoking in the car ahead of me. Maybe I’m half dog or wolf or something, but I can even detect cigarette smoke while traveling at highway speeds.

While trying to get through my compliment of patients last night we were set upon by noxious fumes the likes of which I’ve rarely encountered in my career. Keep in mind, in a former life I used to work as a gravedigger and often had to exhume bodies. I’ve also spent extensive time down wind from fish processing plants, paper mills, and currently live down wind from a poultry farm.

The desk at which I chart is mere feet from the only bathroom in the urgent care. I was quietly if not furiously trying to get through my patient load so I could go home when the cloud enveloped us. I looked over into the room adjoining the bathroom and could see the seventeen year old with a pneumothorax holding her nose. Her mother was cupping her hand over her face and trying to hold her breath as long as possible. As I turned my tearing eyes back to my desk, I noticed my chart was starting to spontaneously combust. Volunteers streamed by at light speed defying their aging bodies to the escape ever-expanding volume of stench.

The security guard standing guard over the crazy lady in room four disappeared from his post. The air tube station next to the bathroom mysteriously stopped working, and the automatic doors froze in the shut position. I braved waves of nausea brought on by the toxic cloud and rescued the seventeen year old and her mother and moved them to a less toxic area.

Returning to the nurses station Ted, the tech, asked the RN what happened. According to the RN, one of the patient’s family members came and used our bathroom. Being the inconsiderate fecallith he was, he did not just take a dump in the receptacle and flush. He took a toxic dump all over the bathroom. When Ted checked the bathroom, he found there was shit all over the floor, splashed on the walls, and even in the sink. The smell was akin to rotting human corpse mixed with pig and poultry poo, mixed with a suspension of decayed fish oil, and sprayed out the ass of a dead and bloated cow.

After the cloud was finally sucked into the ventilation system for all to share in I asked the RN which patient this toxic turd was here for.

She responded that his wife had coded at home and was on a vent in the ER.

Now we know why she coded, I responded.

Several un-PC snickers followed.

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