Nursing School Can be Fun

During my journey through nursing school there have been a couple of times when I've just had to laugh at the situations I found myself in... Situations one would never imagine they would ever be in....

Here is one example:

A patient (not mine) complains of chest pain. My instructor wants us to get more experience preforming 12 lead EKGs, so she sends me and one of my classmates in to do a STAT EKG on this patient. Having done at least half a dozen before, we felt sure this would go just fine.

On the way in, we decide that I would attach the chest leads and my classmate would attach the extremity leads (best decision I ever made, you will see why soon). We then proceed to attach the leads onto his chest, then his arms, then his.....Ummmm.... He only has one leg. Problem. We both look at each other and silently scream "What the heck should we do now???"

We hesitantly decided to run the EKG with only one leg lead attached. No surprise, the EKG machine gives us the error message, "Lead off."

So, we excuse ourselves from the patient, muttering something about the uselessness of machines, to find our instructor and ask her what to do. She says we should attach the other leg lead to the patient's stump.

Now, feeling more confident we prepared to do just that. I say to the patient that we need to attach an additional lead to his stump.

"Stump?" he says....

Apparently it is not politically correct to say stump... It is a "residual appendage."

Ok, now that we got our terminology lesson, my classmate tries to attach the lead. Not as easy as it sounds....the patient, who is very, very large, lying on his left side with little ability to reposition himself tries to guide us and help. Then, the doctor walks in to examine the patient and the EKG read out.

Bad timing. We nervously stumble around trying to get to the man's "residual appendage".....finally my classmate ends up having to go behind the patient and lift up his very large, swollen testicles in order to attach the lead, all while trying NOT to laugh out loud at the very awkward situation we found ourselves in.

We hold our breath as we press the EKG button a second time....with all leads attached to some part of the poor patient's body....

Yes! A read out was printed. success..... And, one for the memory books... Me and that classmate still laugh about the infamous EKG and the residual appendage hiding under the enlarged scrotum to this day.