Queen of AMS

One of my fellow nurses was proclaimed Queen of AMS last night. All of her patients had some form of dementia. After about 12 hours of nonstop climbing out of bed, pulling off the cardiac monitor, trying to rip out the iv, trying to reason with the ramblings of four AMS patients; she too, was about to lose her mind. None of her patients were from nursing homes. They were your husband, wife, grandmother, or grandfather that functioned "independently" in society. Makes me wonder.........how many people are stumbling around at 2am in their homes, or worse yet, driving down the road, out of their friggin' minds? Also, none of the aforementioned patients had any family with them in the deep part of the night. Perhaps, the family was breathing a collective sigh of relief and enjoying the the night off.

Speaking of family, how many of us in nursing have found that some of the family members are more demented than the patient? My demented patient had a wife that was as bad or worse than he. The man and his wife were transplants, having moved down here in retirement for the warmer climate. The man was in awful shape. He was emaciated, covered in dried poo, and speckled with dribbled urine when he came in. Somehow, his half blind, nut of a wife drove up to visit him daily to rant and rave at the dayshift about getting her hubby out of the hospital and back home where she could take care of him right. The family doc evidently used the nice guy approach, the don't rock the boat, just get them out of here asap way. His H&P started out speaking of a "well nourished male" (who the heck was that?). The doctor was told, but he seemed to have overlooked the fact that the patient was demented, covered in feces and urine on arrival, continued to be incontinent of stool and urine while in the hospital. In addition, the man was one big skin lesion after another and no there again the canned H+P sounded like the man had the skin of a healthy baby. I probably started some stuff but I dropped a social worker consult for neglect. And note to self, don't ever use this doc for me or my family...He has his head up his ass.