Code Brown
“Code brown in room 204.” Our nurse preceptor sped out of the nurses’ station and down the hall.
“Oh, my God. What’s a code brown?” Ollie asked me. Her eyes grew wide and sparkled with curiosity. Olivia, Ollie for short, was my five-foot nothing sidekick and one of my best friends. We always seemed to get into trouble when paired together.
“No clue but it sounds awesome, and maybe we’ll get to do something cool.” With that, we headed down the hall in fast pursuit of the nurse.
St. Vincent’s Hospital was one of four hospitals in Lee County. All owned by the same parent company; St. Vincent’s was the newest facility and more technologically advanced than the others. Electronic key cards worn on the chest of each employee housed microchips, and when entering a patient’s room, the name, title, and area of specialty of the staff member, along with their employee photo, was displayed on the television.
Outside each room was a workstation with a computer terminal. I set my clipboard on a shelf before entering room 204 and squirted my hands with the alcohol-based hand soap mounted outside the door. I got three steps into the room and abruptly skidded to a halt. Ollie had been following on my heels and bounced off my back. A room full of nurses and students looked up at us and panic set in. There was no way to slink back out of the room unnoticed.
“Good. Glove up, ladies. We could use some more hands over here.” The words code brown would now forever make me throw up in my mouth. The scene unfolding in front of me was bizarre. A woman lay naked on her side in a hospital bed and was covered in diarrhea. Shit was all over the bed, on the floor, and on the far wall. That’s right, I said far wall. It looked like she had had a blowout. The woman had her head buried in a pillow, hiding her face from the rest of us.
And the smell? Oh God, the fucking smell! Bob, one of my fellow classmates, was up at the woman’s head and holding her hand. “Sir,” he said, “you need to stop clenching your cheeks together. Bear down like you’re having a bowel movement.” There were two things very wrong with Bob’s statement. First and foremost, I couldn’t believe he just called this woman sir. Clearly the naked brown smeared thing in front of him had boobs and a vagina. And second, she already was having a bowel movement. It took me another minute to take in the rest of the scene. Hey, cut me some slack. My eyes and nose had just been assaulted. Due to the feces bomb that had detonated in room 204, the physician had ordered a Flexi-Seal for the patient. Apparently, this procedure is done by nurses. Not knowing what a Flexi-Seal was, I took this opportunity to nonchalantly pick up the package and read the description. The label read ‘a temporary containment device, indicated for immobilized, incontinent patients with liquid or semi-liquid stool.’ The package showed a photo of a silicone tube, a syringe, and a collection bag. At one end of the tubing was a retention balloon to be inserted into the rectum.
This was when I looked up and the reality of the scene came into focus. They were attempting to insert the tube into the patient’s rectum and not having any luck. The tube would go in an inch, buckle, and slide back out. Covered, of course, in K.Y. Jelly and now shit. I looked over at Ollie at this point and could tell she was about to lose it. Her face was bright red, and the corners of her mouth twitched. Tears leaked from her eyes. I felt a case of the giggles coming on. Don’t make eye contact… don’t do it! I repeated to myself.
Then she looked at me, and I did everything in my power not to topple over the edge. It was at this point I realized I was still standing only three feet into the room. So I did what any respectable nursing student would do. I sucked it up, put on a set of gloves, and asked what I could do to help. That’s me, Emma Rossi, nursing student extraordinaire, and glorified ass-wiper.
It turned into one very long night, and I quickly decided that after I graduated and earned my nursing license, I would not be getting a job in Orthopedics. I saw more poop and wiped more asses in one night than I had in my entire life.
Once home, I dragged my aching body through the door from the garage. It was after midnight, and I stripped down to my birthday suit in the laundry room. After throwing every iota of clothing on my person, including my sneakers, into the washing machine (I now understood why they insisted on us getting leather sneakers with no fabric or breathing holes), I walked into the kitchen wearing the towel Jake had left out for me. The smell of burnt popcorn assaulted my nose as I entered. Waving my hand dramatically in front of me, I crinkled my face and peered into the living room, leaning forward with my elbows on the granite countertop. From my vantage point, I could see into all the main rooms of our home by simply turning my head. With my chin resting on my hands, I took a deep breath and let out a long sigh and spent a minute appreciating the recent renovations we’d made to our little piece of the American dream.
I’d finally convinced Jake to take the plunge. Stark white walls were replaced with a color scheme indicative of Ralph Lauren. The kitchen walls were a muted, smoky blue and contrasted elegantly against the new cherry cabinets and stainless steel appliances. The earth-toned glass backsplash sparkled as it reflected the recessed lights hidden under the upper cabinets.
An exact match to the neutral beige in the backsplash had been painted on the walls of the living room where Jake currently lounged on the sofa watching some comedy with Vince Vaughn in Tahiti. For some reason these types of movies always seemed to put him in a goofy mood.
He jumped up from the sofa with his arms in the air like I was the recipient of a surprise party and yelled at me enthusiastically. “Hi, baby! How were your clinicals? Did you save lots of lives?”
Daphne, our seven pound Yorkie, jumped up on the back of the sofa and wagged her stubby tail in greeting. She really was an adorable little thing. Her coat was a steely-blue and tan color. I often joked that she had little-old-lady hair. I kept her fur cut short so she didn’t overheat in the Florida sun when we played outside. She looked up at me with little brown eyes the size of small grapes. That’s all it usually took to get whatever she wanted from me. I totally got the phrase puppy dog eyes after we brought her home from the pet store. She was the real head of the household at Chez Rossi. What Daphne wanted, Daphne got. God forbid we tell her no; she would throw a temper tantrum and stomp her paws like a toddler. And she was stubborn. Lately, I had to add the word now to the end of commands, or she would just stare at me smugly. For some reason the now scared her into action.
I gave Jake the stink-eye. “Not even close. The only thing I saved were patients having to expend energy by walking their asses to the bathroom. Cleaned up a lot of crap. I’m dead tired and have aches and pains in areas I didn’t even know existed.” I grabbed my back and walked hunched around the sofa. I put on my best pathetic voice and hobbled over to him. “I need a hug to make all the pain go away.”
Jake leapt back so fast I thought he was going to fall through the glass coffee table just to get away from me. “Ew, you touched poop? Don’t come near me until you’ve taken the mother of all showers and boiled all those germs off you!” I forgot to mention that my husband is a total germophobe. He wouldn’t come near me even if I’d only been sitting in a classroom talking about disease. It was actually adorable, and I loved chasing him around the house after class just to mess with him. But, alas, he was right; who knew what disgusting things hitchhiked a ride home with me?
“Geez, Jake. You should just put yourself in a bubble and get it over with.” I gave him an exaggerated eye-roll and headed for the bathroom.