TIFU by forgetting to bring a hair tie to work

Buckle up, folks. This is going to be one hell of a ride.

I work in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. 90% of the time, psych hospitals are nothing like the movies. Even the psychotic patients are generally pretty harmless and mostly just talk to themselves and pace around.

This story is about one of the outliers.

The worst patients are the ones who are pretty much just here because they are high off their ass and might be a danger to themselves as they come down. This guy was blitzed off his ass on K2 and very aggressive from the start.

He came to us from a regular hospital after having surgery. He had a big incision in his stomach with staples. Because he was so aggressive and demonstrated self harm (picking at his incision, biting himself) he was put on a 1:1 protocol meaning someone has to be within arms length of him at all times. I did that from for two hours with no incident and then someone else took over.

At about 12:30am, this guy, who had been sleeping, started screaming in his room. We rushed to investigate and he was hitting himself and ripping at his incisions. He was spouting all kinds of crazy crap that didn’t really make sense.

You can’t just sedate a patient, it has to be ordered by a physician. Since this is the night shift, there is no doctor in the building, just nurses and CNAs. We have to call the doctor (wake him up in the middle of the night, very grumpy) and get an order to sedate him. We call for backup from the Sheriffs on duty who provide security for the building and then get ready to sedate him. I realize that I don’t have a hair tie. I hair is long and down. Best case scenario: it’ll be in my face. Worst case scenario: the patient can grab me and hurt me.

We walk into the room and are hit by this awful shit smell. He's smeared it on the floor, the walls, everywhere.

There he stands, naked as the day he was born, shit all over his arms and legs. We can’t worry about that too much right now, there are more pressing matters. I gag a bit. We line up, ready to hold him. I’m a small woman so I’m a little intimidated at the prospect of trying to restrain this big dude, but nonetheless I prepare myself.

And then all he'll breaks loose. Hands and elbows are flying, everyone is grunting and straining, and we are failing miserably to get this guy under control. We can hold him for a second but not long enough to do the injection. While all this is going on, he is dragging everyone through his shit, smearing what's on him on us, and trying to bite us. Eventually, he does make purchase on my ear and I recoil briefly in pain before getting back in the thick of it. The two sheriffs eventually get some handcuffs on him and then we bring him to the ground. Because he bit me (and assaulted everyone really), they place him under arrest. His incision opened up so he was bleeding a bit from his surgical wound. We hold him like that for an hour and a half waiting for more law enforcement to arrive to transport him to jail.

I still have no idea what took them so damn long, but restraining him was exhausting, even with him in handcuffs. Every. Single. One of us. Was covered in his shit. It was on my shoes, my scrubs, my hair, it was awful. We just had to deal with it though. After he was hauled off to jail (still naked, still covered in shit), we mopped the room and tried to clean ourselves up as much as possible. I’m sitting here and typing this while wearing patient scrubs which are made out of paper. So this sucks.

TLDR: I had to wrestled a naked man covered in his own shit and high off his ass. I didn’t have my hair put up, so he pulled my hair and bit my ear AND I got shit all over me (and my hair).