Friends and neighbors, I got my ass kicked on Monday.
And when I say I got my ass kicked, I mean I got my ass kicked.
Let me explain: there are a number of unfortunate things that can happen to make a normally nice, cheerful person batshit insane. Things like drug abuse, encephalopathy, encephalitis, vasculits, meningitis, strokes in unusual places, tumors--you get the idea. There's a lot of stuff out there that can hit your brain in such a way that your personality does a one-eighty, but most of those things are very, very rare indeed.
When they hit you, though. . .wow.
Granddaddy came in with a few personality changes and some increased sleepiness (note for new neuro people: your A-number-one sign that there's a problem is irritability and decreased consciousness in tandem) and steadily got worse. He was transferred to us with a Posey vest on, keeping him in his wheelchair as he cussed and ranted.
At some point in the proceedings, he tried to stand up and tip the wheelchair over backwards in order to get out of it. Gweneth, the steadiest and most sensible of patient care aides, was there in a second, keeping Granddaddy from overbalancing, and Stoya went around to his front to see if she could calm him down. I was close behind her. Too close, as it turned out.
Granddaddy threw a punch. Stoya did some sort of Matrix move to avoid it (thank goodness, as it would've messed up her face), and the punch landed squarely in my solar plexus.
Well! I wasn't expecting that at all.
I made a noise like a duck and went down. I'm not ashamed to admit it: have you ever been punched in the gut? I hadn't. I've been hit in the face, which only makes me angry. I've been whacked about the head and shoulders, which is disorienting and painful, but not too handicapping. Being hit in the stomach, though, right in the breadbasket, so hard that the breath gets knocked out of you? You fold up like a sack of potatoes, which I did.
Unfortunately, I folded up right where Granddaddy, still Posey'd in to his chair, could get to me with both fists and feet.
In retrospect, it's funny. It must've looked like something out of a comedy film, or that clip on YouTube where the dude in the Darth Vader costume gets attacked by a playful dog. At the time, though, all I knew was that I was getting wailed on by an angry person with what felt like superhuman strength. Oh, and I couldn't breathe.
Gweneth managed somehow to get the wheelchair unlocked in the middle of all of this and get Granddad out of range. Stoya got his arms, I got the Haldol, and things quickly got better from there.
Y'know, IV Haldol is strongly not recommended, because it tends to cause heart arrhythmias, but at that point, we didn't care. In a few minutes, things calmed down to the point that Grandpa could go back to bed.
The bruises are fading now. He didn't actually hurt me, but he sure woke me up. This is not something you think about when you're taking the NCLEX.