obesity

It was seriously a long week. I don't really like 12 hour shifts persay, because they are more like 13 hour shifts with the charting and passdown, but anyway, I'm considering going back to 3 12's because dealing with these patients five days a week is really starting to get on my nerves.

This week I have had some of the rudest people I've ever met. And they are all so overweight, which really, I'm a nurse, I see it all the time and it doesn't really bother me that their body habitus is large, but what does bother me is that they make no effort to care for themselves, when we are making extra effort and extra time to care for them.

This one patient who came in, we couldn't even cath (heart cath) the patient because all their extremities were so swollen with fat, there was no access. Patient's in their early thirties, and the physician eventually had to just do open heart surgery. When I was doing pre-op testing, I couldn't even fit the patient through the treadmill room's door, and my V-leads didn't have long enough cords to fit his chest. When I did find a bed big enough to put him in for a simple 12-lead, we had to put on masks because when we lifted the patient's shirt (since they couldn't reach the bottom of their own shirt) the smell was so awful we were gagging. And we smell a lot of bad stuff.

I like that show The Biggest Loser, because those people are motivated to change. I wish I could say this week a patient showed a motivation to change their condition in even the littlest way. That one guy was like, "Well, I guess if I keep having these heart attacks, I guess you could should do surgery..." Yah. Like, who knows what his heart function even is now.

I hope I don't sound like I hate obese people, or hate my patients, I guess I'm just tired. Tired of people not taking care of themselves, and then expecting us to take care of them, and magically save them, when it's usually too late.