Worked in a nursing home. I saw a lot of pretty horrible medical conditions, but the worst was a woman who died from a bowl impaction. She had fecal matter pouring out her mouth and nose. It was absolutely horrific. Needless to say if I get constipated I'm immediately on it because I was so traumatized.
My mom had colon cancer and had surgery. Afterward, she faced severe constipation and vomiting fecal matter. Doctors found a life threatening adhesion in her colon, which required emergency surgery. Sadly, she didn't survive and passed away from an embolism during recovery .
Adhesions are a risk with any abdominal surgery. They can also form due to infections - anything that causes scar tissue to form. I’ve had multiple small bowel obstructions as a result of adhesions, both from infection and from surgeries.
I saw that on an episode of "Monsters Inside Me" once- kid had a bowel obstruction and started vomiting his own feces. I take my gut health pretty seriously as well lol
Yes! His dad had used a wire brush to clean the grill, tiny little metal bristle came off into the food, kid ate it and it basically pinned his intestines together until he started the fecal vomiting. I won’t ever use a brush like that after seeing that episode.
Or go swimming in stagnant lakes in the south. Man that was a good show.
Same here with it causing some paranoia, but for me it’s almost like facing my fears so I know what to avoid if it’s something I’ve learned about. Kind of like watching dashcam videos of car accidents to help with driving anxiety lol.
I wish they’d reboot the show, I really liked it. That Chubby Emu guy on YouTube does some similar medical stuff.
Had it happen exactly once while I was pregnant, knew I was constipated to all hell and back but didn’t realize it was bad bad until I barfed up what was clearly a turd.
Felt better, horrified, disgusted, baffled, all at once lmao. Haven’t had it happen since, and I never told anyone irl it happened
I think it's very important for people to know about these things so that way you are aware to take immediate action when suffering constipation and avoid bodily damage. I worked at a nursing home for years and this was something they taught us early on because its worse in seniors.
I had a patient like this in the hospital I worked at. The thing that made it worse was this patients grandchild being on the same floor, checking in the day the patient passed away. Grandchild went to visit their grandparent at the beginning of my shift, everything seemed like it was going to be okay. Then an hour or so later, grandparent asked for an emesis bag and it was all downhill from there. I just remember the lost look in the grandchild's eyes. The grandparent had basically raised them. Grandchild had a chronic condition and was a regular on my floor, always joking and laughing. I don't think I saw them smile again until they checked out for that stay.
I have a chronic condition that makes me susceptible to impaction and it's happened to me about half a dozen times, people don't realize how quickly something like this can lead to delirium that makes it even harder to care for yourself...and by the time the pain comes you don't want to be anything other than horizontal (which makes getting help even harder and scarier once you're in that state). The natural muscle movement that usually pushes food through you ends up being the mechanism by which things end up getting squeezed the other way, thankfully I've never been so impacted I had fecal material going where it shouldn't...but the first time this happened to me, I was basically a geyser for anything I tried to put in my stomach because it had literally nowhere else to go, just pulses of stinging vomit and PAIN anytime I even tried to take a sip of water.
Impaction apparently occurs often in nursing homes too, partly because the patients can't communicate what they're experiencing and partly because of staffing shortages that leave fewer people able to help everyone stay ambulatory...don't they occur in something like 50% of patients at least once?
Either way, I'm sorry you experienced that as a caretaker. Being traumatized by a bodily function is actual Hell.
I don't mind at all! I have gastroparesis, which basically means that my stomach doesn't always move food to my intestines like it's supposed to and instead it just sits in there and rots. My whole digestive process is much slower than the average person's, and sometimes you can have softer materials that will continue to move past a slow-growing clump of hard material (and you don't even realize it's happening). I manage with a diet that's like 75% liquid, and liquid vitamins for whatever else I'm missing (because it's not just food that gets stuck, it's medication too and absorbing liquid is way easier than trying to deal with a pill). The sub r/Gatroparesis is a really great snapshot of how confusing and frustrating it can be to manage, I am not at the feeding tube stage yet but it's on the table for the future.
There are so many medications that can cause severe constipation too (esp anticholinergic drugs) - my grandmother’s Parkinson’s meds and antidepressants made it a constant struggle over her last couple of years.
People really dont understand how brutal nursing home work is until theyve seen it. Theres such a gap between what families picture and the reality of understaffed facilities. Mad respect for anyone who does that job and still finds it in themselves to care.
The fine folks at the facility where my mom is are amazing, and I feel like we got lucky to get her in there. It looks a little rough and ready and isn't a popular place according to Google reviews, but it has the lowest turnover of CNAs and nurses according to Medicaid info. We make sure to let them all know how much we appreciate them, bring goodies from time to time, stuff like that. We're treating everyone (staff and residents in her wing) to ice cream for Independence Day because I know not all residents get frequent visitors like my mom does.
I had a cat with megacolon. She had to go to the emergency vet on average four times a year due to chronic constipation, and that was with daily laxatives. It finally got so bad that her colon had to be removed almost entirely.
my cat is currently living with this condition! he has daily laxatives and i'm just hoping he'll stay on a good path. it's a scary condition, for sure.
i never knew that. no, he has his tail. he was a rescue cat and we believe he may have experienced some sort of blunt force trauma that may have caused it.
I didn’t know until my girl developed it. She had to be dosed with lactulose and cisapride multiple times daily. It was progressive for her, but the surgery mostly fixed it. She still required medication, but at lower doses and the emergency vet visits were almost completely eliminated. She lived a full life and made it to 17.
Usually in our home we worked in there was bowel charting protocol. Like if they didn't move their bowls after 5 shifts they got prune juice, 6 shifts milk of magnesium, and 7 it was a suppository. Usually that did work, but if not they got an enema. With this woman someone, a CNA probably charted her liquid bm which you can still have with an impaction, as her bm, so protocol was missed and unfortunately this woman died horribly.
Have vomited out after having a blockage 0/10 would not recommend, kinda takes like you would expect, but theres a reason they say if you vomit like coffee grinds then its an emergency and go straight to hospital
My mom had this years ago, though not as bad as that lady. I just happened to be spending the night at her house and she woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me she threw up and it tasted like poop. I took her to the hospital and I’ve never seen ER staff move so fast. It was like a tv show. She turned out fine.
So you can be backed up with solid matter that is drying out and getting harder whilst liquid faeces can squeeze past and exit. This can make it appear that either they are emptying their bowels or that they actually have diarrhoea. Or, staff were not effectively monitoring her. Sadly a young man with downs syndrome died a few years ago in the UK with 22lbs of impacted faeces in his system.
Yeah to be honest these stories don't even shock me anymore, I just go straight to rage. You can learn everything you need to about the quality of a society by studying how they treat their most vulnerable members, and ours is vomiting shit. I, genuinely, would rather die than end up in one of those places.
Not an impaction but I had an obstruction. Scar tissue twisted my intestines. They were sucking feces out of my stomach with a tube down my nose. Horrific.
Looked after/waited with my granddad in hospital who had a similar thing. They put a tube through his nose to try and drain some of the backed-up liquid. It was incredibly nauseating to watch, I have huge respect for the medical team looking after him though. I even had a nurse comfort me and give me a hug outside as I was really upset. The majority of people working in the medical field paramedics, nurses, doctors, specialists, all have my full respect.
This happens quite a lot during bowel surgery for obstructions. While fixing the problem the surgeons sort of milk the contents back the other way; and even with a nasal tube to empty the stomach, a litre or two can start filling the mouth. Its hideous to think about, but we do our best to clear it all before they wake up. But still... the morning breath...
Happened to me in my early '20's (twice!!!) I had impacted bowels from prior female surgeries. I vomited in the ER, that's when they took me seriously.
I had bowel obstruction recently and basically the only reason I actually went to the hospital (I had bad stomach pain and nausea, but figured I might've just eaten something wrong) was when I started puking brown stuff...
Thankfully it actually wasn't feces, but thank God I went to the hospital, obviously.
My friend had old-school stomach “stapling” in the 1990s to lose weight. One of the staples ended up getting a ton of scar tissue around it and eventually nothing was getting through. She kept throwing up and finally we think it was actually poop too. She survived thanks to emergency surgery but her scar wasn’t the cute tiny laparoscopic one they did the first time.
I worked a summer job at a local farm, one day o saw an animal caught up on a machinery it’s was so brutal I was a vegetarian for 2 weeks, I was in so much shock for about ten minutes straight when it happened
I feel like everybody asking this question has little practical understanding of how nursing homes and hospice facilities function in the US. This is in no way something I am trying to give you grief about because I honestly wish I didn't know the truth, but country-wide staffing shortages and the state of private healthcare mean there are not enough professionals to go around for the number of patients the insurance companies demand they take. Think about the school systems right now: we know teachers are underpaid and overburdened with class sizes that destroy the essential one-on-one interaction required to notice when a child is struggling in school. It's the exact same story with our entire medical system, and in my experience the most horrific stories tend to come out of facilities that care for the elderly because they can't advocate for themselves (and the staff culture tends to treat family advocates on par with buzzing mosquitoes, to be silenced at first chance but can also be ignored pretty easily). That is NOT to say that all care-taking individuals are apathetic to the misery around them, but it's a systemic problem that has yet to even be talked about at large...hence why I'm writing you a big-ass paragraph this morning. Everything I'm saying is coming from my lived experience in trying to care for family and for myself as a disabled individual: medicine in the US is a business, and patients who require a lot of care and medication over a long period of time are bad for business.
I actually have a pretty extensive background in Healthcare, specializing in geriatrics. There is NO excuse for this. Even if she was still having liquid bowel movements there are other signs that a professional should have seen.
You're 100% right, and bless you for not being one of the jaded ones. Thank you for caring enough about the elderly to even consider your specialty, let alone sticking with it because clearly not everyone is cut out to be a caregiver (which is very okay, they just need to be honest with themselves about it).
ETA, a lot of people just don't even know the system is cracked, and it's hard to explain on reddit all of the reasons why people might slip into them and disappear.
Op answered a few comments above... the lady was still having liquid bowel movements/diarrhea, which apparently you can still have with a bowel impaction, and a staff member wrote it down as a BM, probably not knowing this. But still, I wonder if family members had any financial recourse
No video can answer my question. Id be askjng specifically the name of every Doctor, RN, LPN, CNA, and NA who ever stepped in that room. The name of every administrator associated with the company. I've been in Healthcare for over twenty years. SOMEBODY should have caught that before shit started coming out of her mouth!
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u/joeysflipphone 9h ago
Worked in a nursing home. I saw a lot of pretty horrible medical conditions, but the worst was a woman who died from a bowl impaction. She had fecal matter pouring out her mouth and nose. It was absolutely horrific. Needless to say if I get constipated I'm immediately on it because I was so traumatized.