Monday, March 21, 2005  Genuine Appreciation  This was years
ago: nurse G. quietly asked me to come help him and nurse K.
with a patient.  We walked down the hall to the room to find the
patient on the floor next to her specialty bed. That particular
kind of bed had pretty low siderails, and when little nurse K.
had rolled the patient over to clean up a mess of incontinent
stool, the patient just kept rolling. Her own body weight (she
was quite obese,) gave her the momentum to just go over the
rails and K. couldn't stop her.  It took about five of us to get
her flaccid and heavy (near 300 lbs.) body onto a rigid
backboard to lift her back into bed.  Her urinary catheter got
pulled out, and while K. reinserted it, G. and I each had to
hold up a fat leg out of the way so K. could see where to insert
the new one. How come they never show things like that on TV
medical shows?  That particular patient was a controversial one.
She was irreversibly vegetative. After suffering a heart attack,
she stopped breathing lo