Warning: this content may be somewhat disturbing.

On a more positive note, maybe I should try auditioning as a story developer for “House.”

These are some actual nightmares that I’ve had recently:

I have this patient. I know that he is extremely sick and dying. I have a sense that his insides are decomposing even as he looks up at me and blinks his eyes. The doctors are approaching for AM rounds. I know they are expecting an update from me and I haven’t done anything for my assessment. I don’t want to lay my hand on this patient; I’m afraid I will somehow harm him. What can I do to quickly to produce some data to report to the docs? I decide to take his tympanic temperature. As I push the probe into his ear I realize that it’s gone in too easily, to quickly. His brain is mush. Much to my horror, I pull out the probe and realize that it has grabbed my patient’s eyeball and pulled it out, much like an apple corer. I drop it on the bed and walk away from the room.

Then I notice lots of people in my patient’s room. Visitors – two angelic pale looking ladies dressed in white. Other visitors with military uniforms on… then a crew comes by to do a bedside CT scan. I realize that everyone is going to see that eyeball lying there on the bed…

“What’s wrong?” asks another nurse. I tell her what happened with the eyeball.
“Just go in there and put it back in!”
“I can’t go in there. I’m too freaked out.”
“Okay, then. I will.” She then proceeds to the room and sticks they eyeball back into the patient and no one is worse for the wear.

Then, last night:

Before I went to sleep I was talking to my husband about a theory I was developing. I was thinking that skin breakdown as a stage of sepsis is perhaps an accurate predictor of death, and yet it is often ignored by doctors when deciding if a patient will make it or not. I’m talking about when a patient is in multi-organ failure and their skin is continuously oozing out bright yellow serous fluid onto the bed. You can’t keep up with keeping dry chucks pads underneath him. When the patient reaches this point only the nurse seems to notice or care. The doctors will go on telling the family that “the numbers look good” and “we still have hope.” But as a nurse you instinctively know that this type of skin breakdown almost always leads to death. The skin is an organ that can fail just as well as your kidneys or lungs can fail.

So then I dreamed this:

I took over care of this patient. I looked at his documentation from the previous shift and realized that no one had been able to obtain on O2 saturation on him, nor could they document a pulse. From what I could figure this patient had been PEA arresting for 12 hours straight. He was basically dead. And all of his serous fluid had leaked out onto the bed. I told the attending and this is what he said:

“Here’s what you do. Grab a large pillow and take 90% of the feathers out of it. Then put the patient’s body in the pillow, seal it up and put it in the dryer for one hour.”

I woke up horrified.

Some of you might be thinking that these are pregnancy-induced bizarre dreams (supposedly a lot of women experience strange or vivid dreams during pregnancy). I don’t think that this is necessarily true. Case in point: this is what I dreamed two years ago as I was starting my orientation to the the unit:

As new nurses, we were sent to the morgue. They decided that this would be the best place to practice our assessment skills because we couldn’t really do any harm to dead patients. We started unzipping body bags. There were all shapes and sizes of corpses and some of them were dismembered. As we practiced on them some of the corpses suddenly began to sit bolt upright, scaring the living crap out of us.

Perhaps I should have quit while I was ahead. At the very least I think it may be time to find another type of nursing to practice.