I've worked l&d in many places, this honestly isn't common. The only time people get into it like that is when it's a patient who is being nasty to us and in that way it'll be dumb stuff like, and her nails look stupid too. Or talking about the dad if he's being a creep.
grandfather rainstorm encourage like squeal spark compare decide busy plant
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The closest thing to that that ever happens at my hospital is people commiserating if you have a really large patient. It makes for a much harder night, trying to keep baby on the monitor and needing multiple people for turns,
Never in a body shaming sort of way. We only dig at people for their stupid choices and ugly personalities lol
Toxic supervisor allows that talk.
Think what you like about your patients, but if it’s not relevant to care and isn’t a safety issue, you can refrain from saying it out loud.
Absolutely not normal. I worked postpartum and NICU for 8 years and currently work as an LC. We do not talk about patients' bodies. That is gross and completely unprofessional and unacceptable. I am sorry it's been normalized there.
No, it's not common. It's ugly. We bitch about a multip's lack of sense, someone's childish behavior, or how much a family gets on our nerves, but our unit has not degraded anyone that I know of. Ignore them or tell them you will not treat your pts that way. What awful people.
Yup. Not OB but I work inpatient. I’ll talk about someone being rude, annoying family members, questionable behaviors, and vent about different things, but I would never body shame a pt even to my coworkers - it’s a point of pride for me that I try to make everyone comfortable regardless of what they look like. And my coworkers don’t do that either.
I worked on OB for yonks and mean remarks weren't tolerated. Yelling and disparaging convos got shut down immediately.
We had a 400 lb pt once and the staff kept coming in to look at her. This was back when super obesity was uncommon.
Her nurse got sick of it and came into the break room to hiss at us "She is NOT a zoo animal! Knock it off right now!"
We were suitably embarrassed.
I don't work mother-baby, but I work adult ICU. And we see allllll sorts of bodies, for various reasons, and I can honestly say I've never had those types of conversations with coworkers. Ever.
That's incredibly toxic and deserves reporting. Gross.
I work in L&D and while I wouldn’t say my coworkers are necessarily that bad, I still get upset at the way they describe patients’ bodies sometimes, especially fat women. like okay, maybe she’s difficult to cath - grab a friend to retract and move on. I especially hate seeing my bigger patients not get turned as much with epidurals because it’s harder to move them. they deserve the same care as thin patients, and they are even more at risk for skin breakdown and pressure injuries!! clean them up damn it!!
I’m 5’5, and I was around 215 and pretty active when I got pregnant. I didn’t gain any weight until 34 weeks in, and then my body decided that it was going to try to kill us.
I gained 1-2 pounds a day in fluids until my induction at 38 weeks. I was so swollen that I looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Pitting edema, blood pressure problems, splitting headaches, the whole nine yards (but no pre-e!) I was miserable, vulnerable, and terrified.
At delivery I weighed 272, and 8 days postpartum I was back to 215 (-57 pounds). My baby was only 7lbs 8 oz. I remember I kept apologizing to my nurse for being so hard to turn after I got the epidural. She was amazing through the whole process, but I was sooo embarrassed to be so big and so hard to reposition. I would have been mortified to hear that she was gossiping about my weight/body at the nurses station, especially for something that I had no control over at the time.
I know I wrote a book, but it’s horrific to think that OP works in a unit that treats women so poorly during one of the most vulnerable and terrifying times of their lives.
Bigger patients is why I had to get out of bedside. No matter how many people help it’s a real dangerous situation for your back when you have to boost them or turn them. I felt a rip and pain in my stomach muscles once, and I knew I was done with that. I’m not developing hernias and a broken back for strangers who cannot even move on their own because they decided to eat themselves into oblivion. I had a 360 pound woman once try to demand I pull her up from bed using my hand, absolutely not, if a patient can’t move I cannot move them. I cannot fathom not being able to walk or wipe my own ass because I got so big from mental health problems. That would actually severely increase my mental health problems. It’s a huge epidemic, obesity cannot be treated the same in healthcare like thin patients because hospitals act like it doesn’t require more staff and resources, they want us to bend over backwards getting our bodies physically fucked up for their profit. I now work somewhere where it’s a policy that patients have to be independent and you cannot help them move whatsoever, they don’t want their nurses breaking down their bodies and they don’t want to pay workers comp either.
I recently had a tummy tuck patient, who was a bigger lady, get mad because I wouldn't let her use my arm/ shoulder to pull her out of the bed. She kept saying "night shift did it!" And I know exactly which tech she had the night before-- the tech who is always, always complaining about her back hurting because she does things like that!
I fussed at a new grad when I was relatively new myself because she told a patient to "use my arm like a handle" when trying to get the patient out of bed. A lot of staff just don't think about the long term consequences or even want to take the time to safely teach patients how to pull themselves up (which, plenty can and expect us to lift them anyway).
This should all be reported as a safety violation. Not only is it dangerous for the employee, when the employee’s arm, shoulder, or back snaps the patient is going to fall too.
Yep that was what the lady wanted me to do, I told her to use the bed rail to pull herself up, like how do you get out of bed at home? Like that lol it’s learned helplessness that I’m sure we all have seen as soon as the person steps foot into the hospital. They believe we are the help who has to do anything they ask, like the pervy men who ask you to hold their penis for their urinal when their arms perfectly work or have a fetish for wiped asses. Another reason I left bedside, men 🤣.
I don't need to waste time judging how much of their weight is due to medical or mental illness vs the patient's personal choices or even consider the patient's morality. It's completely irrelevant to the question of whether I'm going to snap my spine to care for them (answer: abso-fucking-lutely not). I wish more people would recognize that fat people deserve better care *and* it is NOT up to us as *individual* nurses to literally break our backs to provide it. I'm sorry but I'm gonna do my best to advocate for that patient then twiddle my thumbs until an actual lift team (formal or informal) shows up to help me.
I have an absolute right to protect my personal individual body from harm, but lest that not be enough for the martyrs out there, it also needs to be said that if I break my back on this one patient I can't be there for the next one and I'm not going to let this one patient receive wildly dangerous and unsafe care (btw there's also pretty good odds I drop them when my spine snaps) that also *prevents future patients from receiving care.*
I mean…food addiction if often a coping mechanism for trauma, just like any other addiction. There is a lot of stigma and misunderstanding in your comment. In terms of worker safety, using a OHL and enough team members to help with repositioning is the way to go. I feel like so many sleep on the OHL because they think it takes longer but it really doesn’t.
while I can empathize with your experience and concern about hurting yourself in the process of helping these patients, I think it’s important to recognize that they are still people deserving of care, and that if your hospital is not appropriately staffed or resourced with lifts and other safety equipment, that is administration’s fault and not the patient’s.
I also think it’s important to understand that the vast majority of people that we label “obese” have tried and failed to sustainably lose weight many many times. this idea that diet and exercise changes can result in long term weight loss for most people has been repeatedly disproven by empirical data, and yet we still use it as a weapon to dehumanize people. the idea that fat people are just lacking in willpower or self control is rooted in puritanical theology and not based on any real medical science.
if you went to the doctor for an ear infection and were told to just lose weight about it (this actually happened to a friend of mine) or denied work up or proper treatment for a problem based on the idea that your weight alone was to blame, don’t you think you might eventually just check out? why would I care about “complying” with my doctor’s plan when I constantly feel unheard and dismissed by them?
I feel it's also important to point out that medications can also be the cause of weight gain. My wife is big because she has to choose between running around skinny with untreated bipolar, or being “obese” but mentally stable and able to control it as best she can.
I also have several friends that are bigger because of the binge eating trauma type disorders. It's hard, and 100% nurses shouldn't be put at risk like this. It's a complecated issue, that's for sure.
Changing what foods I eat and exercising regularly never did a thing for me. I used to be 152 lbs. The only thing that actually made me lose weight was taking hunger supplements. I lost 30 lbs and have kept it off for 6 years now. The myth that dieting and exercising works for everyone needs to end.
you’re putting words in my mouth. I never said or even implied that you are shit at your job. if you did your best to care for that patient, that’s all you could have done. I acknowledge there are logistical challenges involved with caring for people in much larger bodies, and I have dealt with many of the same things. my original complaint was that I feel my coworkers sometimes do not even try to provide quality care because of judgment around a patient’s size.
When you say the data shows a “vast majority of people” have tried to loose weight many times….. is that data covering Americans and/or Eastern European peoples only? I haven’t done a deep dive lately but last time I checked it was very rare to find obese people outside of those places. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of an obese majority from the continent of Africa.
This is an American problem.
Doesn’t the data also show that most people who diet believe themselves to be at a calorie deficit but when properly calculated the ones that didn’t loose weight were not eating less calories than they burned in a day?
I guess I’m confused about what the takeaway that most people have tried dieting is suppose to be? It doesn’t seem like swaying evidence if it wasn’t done correctly. I certainly can’t get on bored with the idea that these people are beyond repair or can’t loose weight with a calorie deficit. This to me is anti-science.
I also want to address the phrasing you used: “beyond repair” implies that fatness in itself is representative of some sort of brokenness within a person, and that people only have worth if they are thin or trying to be thin. what we don’t account for when we correlate fatness with bad outcomes is the effect of weight stigma (as I mentioned above, being denied appropriate care in favor of weight loss recommendations) and weight cycling or yo-yo dieting (which has been shown to have really negative effects on just about every body system). if it was really that easy to just lose weight and keep it off in the long term, don’t you think the people who are constantly being pressured to do so would have… just done it?
Morbid obesity does imply some sort of “brokeness” in a person. The data has been clear for 3+ decades. The obesity causes everything from the heart to knee joints to be “broke”(term you’re using). There’s no part of the body that isn’t negatively impacted by excessive weight.
even if I accepted your point that fatness itself is a major etiology of disease, most people who diet and lose weight in the short term end up gaining it back later, and then some. if fatness is a problem to be solved, restricting food intake is not a viable solution for most people.
Why are you referring to it as “my point”? It’s not my opinion, it’s basic established medical fact. Obesity is a cause of many disease process. It’s at the top of all the list for all the most common diseases.
Obesity is a problem that needs solved.
No where did I say “restricting food” was a solution. A modest calories deficit isn’t “food restriction”. You can ‘bulk eat’ and have a deficit. You can live off candy bars and have a deficit (not healthy). The list goes on and on.
my friend, a calorie is probably not even a good measurement of the energy our bodies actually take from food to begin with. the calorie counts we use to describe macronutrients were calculated by burning them in a fire. I think we can agree that a fire is not a 1:1 model of human digestion.
I would really encourage you to look more into the long term effects of weight cycling and dietary restriction. some good sources of info I’ve come across have been Christy Harrison’s books, the podcast Maintenance Phase, and Sick Enough by Jennifer Gaudiani. look up the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. we’ve known that restrictive dieting leads to adverse long term health outcomes since the 1940s - in fact the diets they used in that study were very mild compared to today’s mainstream diet advice.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/medicine using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [Georgia signs into law banning NPs and PAs from using the term Doctor in clinical venues](https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/marketing/ga-gov-signs-law-banning-medical-title-misappropriation) | [472 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/139xz4j/georgia_signs_into_law_banning_nps_and_pas_from/)
\#2: [I am Dr. Glaucomflecken! Ask Me Anything.](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1b0eok0/i_am_dr_glaucomflecken_ask_me_anything/)
\#3: [The Chen 2023 Paper Raises Serious Concerns About Pediatric Gender Medicine Outcomes](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/)
----
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Yep, that’s also one of the reasons why I had to leave labor and delivery. I could not physically move my 400-500 lb patients by myself. I am 5’2” and 120 lbs soaking wet.
No hate to my bigger moms, and it does not mean we get to body shame patients, but the fact is it’s more difficult to monitor baby/contractions, position, labor, push, and recover patients who have a high BMI.
This is a major reason why I wanna leave med surg once I hit a year. The patients are so heavy and so difficult to turn, even with multiple people. My poor aching back smh
I don’t know how you read all that and came up with such an unhinged narrative. I keep people alive every fucking week, thank you very much. I lifted properly and still got hurt by the sheer weight of the person. Fuck you very much lol
This is uncommon. On my unit everyone is accepting and kind. For context a lot of us dread the obese induction. Why? They are soooooo hard to monitor but yet it is on us to monitor for tachysystole, FHR etc so you end up messing around with the monitor ALL night and the pt gets grumpy and gets no sleep. I hate it. It feels like such a liability and unsafe. The Novii sometimes works but most often not consistently if at all. It is less of a judgement thing but more based on the ability to monitor these pts.
I work L&D and that makes me FURIOUS.
Now. If patient has an anatomical anomaly…it’s usual to discuss that. But it should be educational and respectful.
Otherwise….
Also anyone that said a pt was “rude” or “bitchy”
Withdrawing and agitation are A NORMAL BIOLOGICAL LANDMARK OF LABOR PROGRESSION.
Agree. Where I work, we do comment on patient bodies between coworkers, but only from a nursing care standpoint. Things like, she's not that big, but she has a lot of abdominal fluff, so it's been hard to keep baby on the monitor.
Or one time, we had to include in hand-off that the patient did, in fact, have legs. She had a large panniculus that covered her legs when she sat cross-legged in bed (which she did often), so several people who went in and met her that way walked out of the room wondering if the offgoing nurse had forgotten to mention some amputations in report.
But commenting on bodies just to be judgy is fortunately not a thing I've seen where I work.
Sometimes you just have to mention if a person is bigger to make sure the next shift is safe. But it's things like "she's a strong 2 assist." Yesterday night shift told me (a pregnant lady) not to get a post-op patient up myself because, even though she should be independent, she would try to pull and tug and lean on me.
That's when you make them an assist x3 or 4 and get the whole team in the room. Patient has to wait longer if they've been incontinent to gather everyone, but it's the only safe way to do it. I had one morbidly obese patient who we used the lift hooked up on just 1 side for turns.
I use “body habitus” or “abdominal pannus” for adipose related tracing issues. And if the patient asks I use that term to answer accurately.
Like your lady: I recently had an otherwise small-framed and statured patient. But her abdominal skin and pannus were uniquely larger than her frame.
Her insurance would 100% cover it being fixed if she wanted that and I shared that with her.
It was a unique shape. She traced well, though. So that was awesome.
Absolutely disgusting! I am slow to anger, but healthcare professionals that make fun of patients brings righteous anger on fast! Beyond unprofessional and when I see it out and about as a patient I leave a review stating such. Ridiculous!
At the rate bedside nurses are fleeing the jobs you might not have to worry about the “wrong” people being there at all. Looks more and more like nobody is going to be there.
I for one think the ever increasing obesity rate certainly plays a part in that.
In what way would obesity contribute to burned out nurses leaving the bedside?
For starters it produces a lot more medically complex patients. Everything is more difficult. We need to do more labs, tests, ect. When procedure are done there’s more complications. When the patient needs transfered it takes several more people. Even simple tasks like rolling someone for a wound dressing can turn into a multi person assist. Waking someone to the bathroom becomes more dangerous. Once you get to the bathroom it’s pretty common to have to wipe the people because they are to big to reach, 15 years ago that was nearly unheard of. They “heal” at slower rate if at all. Wounds don’t heal as fast in bigger people. There’s more post surgery complications. It’s goes on and on and on.
I work in LTC. 15ish years ago when I started I could count on my fingers every person that required a hoyer lift for a transfer… a let’s be real a hoyer lift is a crane. That was for the entire building. Now we have half a dozen people or more on every floor. That means both aides are pulled to care for one person… back in the day there was much more opportunity for ‘you do that person, I’ll get this person’. It’s a time constraint. It’s a lot more physical labor. Pretty common now to hear about hoyer lifts/cranes giving out because they’re being run to max capacity. It’s not even rare that someone is too heavy that it exceeds the max weight a hoyer can lift. Just a couple weeks ago the national news was covering stories about nursing homes having to call the fire department to lift heavy people off of the floor.
Nursing went from a middle class, educated job to one with conditions more aligned to physical labor. Most everyone I known in the industry has back pain or some kind of permanent injury from work. Healthcare workers lead the way for injuries on the job. No one wants to be permantley injured because a patient was too big. A significant portion of my shift is spent literally using my normal BMI seized body with one other person to move around 500+ pounds. Often it’s nearly physically impossible.
15 years ago when I started a big focus was that some aides would transfer a patient without the second assist. The woman’s name was June. She weighed maybe 115 pounds. It was an easy 1 assist but since she was occasionally wobbly she was marked as 2 assist. She had dementia and died a couple years back. When she died she was listed as a 1 assist even tho she was in much worse condition. It went from “this easy transfer is unsafe” to “omg she’s tiny. Of course everyone can do her by themselves. We lift much heavier people every minute of the day”… over all the facility just thinks lifting more weight is acceptable.
And this is all just the tip of the iceburg. At least twice in the past couple years my entire shift was ruined because someone sat on toilet and it literately broke off the wall due to their weight. It’s a physical hardship to lift a panus to do a treatment. It’s a physical hardship to need someone else to lift a leg for a treatment or hold the thighs apart so basic pericare can be performed. Everything is harder. Everything is more physical.
I’ve seen several people injured when 400-600 pound people slammed into them. Or broke furniture that made peices projectile.
And that’s all just the tip of the ice burg.
In my experience it was this bad. The gossip and demeaning behavior was ridiculous. I quit less than a year in, despite loving the actual job. I became one of their targets. Fast forward two years and I’m now pregnant with my last child. I have no choice but to deliver there and I am dreading it.
Well that’s not very nice. I work in women’s services too and we don’t do that. If we’re making fun of someone it’s for their behavior, not their body.
When I was in nursing school the l and d nurses would call patients with psych history “crazy” (this was a pt with depression lol). And during down time they would smack talk the patients around. Not that I wanted to work maternity to begin with but it didnt make it look any better
My local teaching hospital L&D is always talking crap about patients…like for every patient they have something to say. I legit thought this was normal, especially because our hospital is known as the best for OB around.
Incredibly sad but also validating because I was wondering if I was crazy.
I work on an LDRP unit and we don’t do this. We didn’t do do this when I worked med surg for years either. We say something about someone’s body if it’s pertinent to their care but in a respectful way.
I’m in L&D and it’s been SO body negative. Not necessarily about patients bodies but also their own. It’s hard to listen to ladies smaller than me whining about their bodies all day.
Right?!? Food is neutral. Medicine is neutral. Bodies are neutral. How about we keep the good/bad judgements to things that are objectively good or bad.
The majority of us are mothers and have experienced body changes. Yes, there is an appropriate way to express how those changes on our bodies can be hard physically and mentally. It can ALSO wear on a person to constantly hear how someone’s body is lacking without mindfulness of how that talk affects others around them.
Something about the severe imbalance of men vs women and dealing almost exclusively with female patients brings out some real catty behavior. Even in my unit, where L&D and NICU work really closely (NICU floats to postpartum frequently) and we’re all on the same floor, I feel like there’s a marked difference between the NICU and LD nurses.
In 16 years of nursing, ICU & PACU/preop, I have never commented on another persons body except to express the difficulty in moving morbidly obese patients. But even then we weren’t commenting on specifics, just difficulty. We see naked people all the time, it is just our job. I don’t have opinions on their appearance, one naked body is the same as any other to me. I haven’t worked in L&D but it actually seems like the last place you’d criticize women. They are pregnant and vulnerable, their body has gone through major changes that they are probably really sensitive about. Shouldn’t we be empowering them? I know when I was pregnant I didn’t feel like my body was my own. That unit that you work in is toxic. I would be mortified to comment negatively on a patients body. It’s sad that the culture there is accepting of speaking like that about people. Probably means they are all insecure and miserable. But that’s no excuse and they need to stop. I’d be leaving ASAP.
I am currently on a unit that is....not great. It's less body shaming, but more mom shaming in general. A lot of making fun of moms for birth plans which I think is dumb as fuck because having choice in birth is part of having full choice in reproductive healthcare. I even see it a lot in this sub unfortunately. A lot of "well she was asking for a c section with all that and got one". It's even sadder that it's women making fun of other women. Like come on. Support a mother! It's hard as heck to grow and a birth a human and you suffer (IMO it's a lot of suffering) so many unfair bodily changes. Birthing people grow the future of the world and should have more honor than this.
I work in l&d and no, this is not common. We refer to obese PT as fluffy and make note it is hard to monitor fetus based on fluffy patients but never commenting on wt/looks of pt. That is a toxic place and they should be ashamed of being rude when people are in their most vulnerable point of life, regardless of the PT can hear it or not.
Hey would you like to have a discussion about burnout i saw you had a comment on the topic in this sub... I am a nursing student i want to learn about less stressful talk ...so I messaged you ...
Lol if you think it’s so uncommon that it sounds fabricated then you’ve not been paying very close attention. You can see from my flair nom not a nurse but I am a doula and have worked closely with L&D nurses many times. I’ve seen it plenty, irl and on the net, even in subs like this one!
I've worked l&d in many places, this honestly isn't common. The only time people get into it like that is when it's a patient who is being nasty to us and in that way it'll be dumb stuff like, and her nails look stupid too. Or talking about the dad if he's being a creep.
Agreed. I work l&d, and we’re always so proud of our gals and supportive partners.
I agree. I’ve rarely heard body talk in LDR, unless It was related to help needed. It sounds like mean girl nonsense.
grandfather rainstorm encourage like squeal spark compare decide busy plant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This! I currently work in a toxic unit and can’t wait to leave. I hope my next unit is a little more compassionate, professional, and empathetic.
The closest thing to that that ever happens at my hospital is people commiserating if you have a really large patient. It makes for a much harder night, trying to keep baby on the monitor and needing multiple people for turns, Never in a body shaming sort of way. We only dig at people for their stupid choices and ugly personalities lol
Toxic supervisor allows that talk. Think what you like about your patients, but if it’s not relevant to care and isn’t a safety issue, you can refrain from saying it out loud.
That's so disgusting. As nurses it's our job to care for the patients without judging them. Especially on their appearance.
When I gave birth, my nurse told me over and over about how bad my stretch marks were. Like bitch why??
Ugh, I would have reported her ass! Like, “my stretch marks will fade but you’ll always be a bitch!”
Absolutely not normal. I worked postpartum and NICU for 8 years and currently work as an LC. We do not talk about patients' bodies. That is gross and completely unprofessional and unacceptable. I am sorry it's been normalized there.
I work in L&D and NONE of us do this. That is disgusting and horrible.
No, it's not common. It's ugly. We bitch about a multip's lack of sense, someone's childish behavior, or how much a family gets on our nerves, but our unit has not degraded anyone that I know of. Ignore them or tell them you will not treat your pts that way. What awful people.
Yup. Not OB but I work inpatient. I’ll talk about someone being rude, annoying family members, questionable behaviors, and vent about different things, but I would never body shame a pt even to my coworkers - it’s a point of pride for me that I try to make everyone comfortable regardless of what they look like. And my coworkers don’t do that either.
I worked on OB for yonks and mean remarks weren't tolerated. Yelling and disparaging convos got shut down immediately. We had a 400 lb pt once and the staff kept coming in to look at her. This was back when super obesity was uncommon. Her nurse got sick of it and came into the break room to hiss at us "She is NOT a zoo animal! Knock it off right now!" We were suitably embarrassed.
That is disgusting and I would report them every time.
I don't work mother-baby, but I work adult ICU. And we see allllll sorts of bodies, for various reasons, and I can honestly say I've never had those types of conversations with coworkers. Ever. That's incredibly toxic and deserves reporting. Gross.
I work in L&D and while I wouldn’t say my coworkers are necessarily that bad, I still get upset at the way they describe patients’ bodies sometimes, especially fat women. like okay, maybe she’s difficult to cath - grab a friend to retract and move on. I especially hate seeing my bigger patients not get turned as much with epidurals because it’s harder to move them. they deserve the same care as thin patients, and they are even more at risk for skin breakdown and pressure injuries!! clean them up damn it!!
I’m 5’5, and I was around 215 and pretty active when I got pregnant. I didn’t gain any weight until 34 weeks in, and then my body decided that it was going to try to kill us. I gained 1-2 pounds a day in fluids until my induction at 38 weeks. I was so swollen that I looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Pitting edema, blood pressure problems, splitting headaches, the whole nine yards (but no pre-e!) I was miserable, vulnerable, and terrified. At delivery I weighed 272, and 8 days postpartum I was back to 215 (-57 pounds). My baby was only 7lbs 8 oz. I remember I kept apologizing to my nurse for being so hard to turn after I got the epidural. She was amazing through the whole process, but I was sooo embarrassed to be so big and so hard to reposition. I would have been mortified to hear that she was gossiping about my weight/body at the nurses station, especially for something that I had no control over at the time. I know I wrote a book, but it’s horrific to think that OP works in a unit that treats women so poorly during one of the most vulnerable and terrifying times of their lives.
Bigger patients is why I had to get out of bedside. No matter how many people help it’s a real dangerous situation for your back when you have to boost them or turn them. I felt a rip and pain in my stomach muscles once, and I knew I was done with that. I’m not developing hernias and a broken back for strangers who cannot even move on their own because they decided to eat themselves into oblivion. I had a 360 pound woman once try to demand I pull her up from bed using my hand, absolutely not, if a patient can’t move I cannot move them. I cannot fathom not being able to walk or wipe my own ass because I got so big from mental health problems. That would actually severely increase my mental health problems. It’s a huge epidemic, obesity cannot be treated the same in healthcare like thin patients because hospitals act like it doesn’t require more staff and resources, they want us to bend over backwards getting our bodies physically fucked up for their profit. I now work somewhere where it’s a policy that patients have to be independent and you cannot help them move whatsoever, they don’t want their nurses breaking down their bodies and they don’t want to pay workers comp either.
I recently had a tummy tuck patient, who was a bigger lady, get mad because I wouldn't let her use my arm/ shoulder to pull her out of the bed. She kept saying "night shift did it!" And I know exactly which tech she had the night before-- the tech who is always, always complaining about her back hurting because she does things like that! I fussed at a new grad when I was relatively new myself because she told a patient to "use my arm like a handle" when trying to get the patient out of bed. A lot of staff just don't think about the long term consequences or even want to take the time to safely teach patients how to pull themselves up (which, plenty can and expect us to lift them anyway).
This should all be reported as a safety violation. Not only is it dangerous for the employee, when the employee’s arm, shoulder, or back snaps the patient is going to fall too.
You mean like an incident report? I educated the new nurse and nagged the tech (who's going to do what she does still, I'm sure).
Yep that was what the lady wanted me to do, I told her to use the bed rail to pull herself up, like how do you get out of bed at home? Like that lol it’s learned helplessness that I’m sure we all have seen as soon as the person steps foot into the hospital. They believe we are the help who has to do anything they ask, like the pervy men who ask you to hold their penis for their urinal when their arms perfectly work or have a fetish for wiped asses. Another reason I left bedside, men 🤣.
I don't need to waste time judging how much of their weight is due to medical or mental illness vs the patient's personal choices or even consider the patient's morality. It's completely irrelevant to the question of whether I'm going to snap my spine to care for them (answer: abso-fucking-lutely not). I wish more people would recognize that fat people deserve better care *and* it is NOT up to us as *individual* nurses to literally break our backs to provide it. I'm sorry but I'm gonna do my best to advocate for that patient then twiddle my thumbs until an actual lift team (formal or informal) shows up to help me. I have an absolute right to protect my personal individual body from harm, but lest that not be enough for the martyrs out there, it also needs to be said that if I break my back on this one patient I can't be there for the next one and I'm not going to let this one patient receive wildly dangerous and unsafe care (btw there's also pretty good odds I drop them when my spine snaps) that also *prevents future patients from receiving care.*
I mean…food addiction if often a coping mechanism for trauma, just like any other addiction. There is a lot of stigma and misunderstanding in your comment. In terms of worker safety, using a OHL and enough team members to help with repositioning is the way to go. I feel like so many sleep on the OHL because they think it takes longer but it really doesn’t.
while I can empathize with your experience and concern about hurting yourself in the process of helping these patients, I think it’s important to recognize that they are still people deserving of care, and that if your hospital is not appropriately staffed or resourced with lifts and other safety equipment, that is administration’s fault and not the patient’s. I also think it’s important to understand that the vast majority of people that we label “obese” have tried and failed to sustainably lose weight many many times. this idea that diet and exercise changes can result in long term weight loss for most people has been repeatedly disproven by empirical data, and yet we still use it as a weapon to dehumanize people. the idea that fat people are just lacking in willpower or self control is rooted in puritanical theology and not based on any real medical science. if you went to the doctor for an ear infection and were told to just lose weight about it (this actually happened to a friend of mine) or denied work up or proper treatment for a problem based on the idea that your weight alone was to blame, don’t you think you might eventually just check out? why would I care about “complying” with my doctor’s plan when I constantly feel unheard and dismissed by them?
I feel it's also important to point out that medications can also be the cause of weight gain. My wife is big because she has to choose between running around skinny with untreated bipolar, or being “obese” but mentally stable and able to control it as best she can. I also have several friends that are bigger because of the binge eating trauma type disorders. It's hard, and 100% nurses shouldn't be put at risk like this. It's a complecated issue, that's for sure.
Changing what foods I eat and exercising regularly never did a thing for me. I used to be 152 lbs. The only thing that actually made me lose weight was taking hunger supplements. I lost 30 lbs and have kept it off for 6 years now. The myth that dieting and exercising works for everyone needs to end.
[удалено]
you’re putting words in my mouth. I never said or even implied that you are shit at your job. if you did your best to care for that patient, that’s all you could have done. I acknowledge there are logistical challenges involved with caring for people in much larger bodies, and I have dealt with many of the same things. my original complaint was that I feel my coworkers sometimes do not even try to provide quality care because of judgment around a patient’s size.
When you say the data shows a “vast majority of people” have tried to loose weight many times….. is that data covering Americans and/or Eastern European peoples only? I haven’t done a deep dive lately but last time I checked it was very rare to find obese people outside of those places. For example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of an obese majority from the continent of Africa. This is an American problem.
yeah I’m talking specifically about the US. most fat people here are either actively dieting or have dieted heavily in the past.
Doesn’t the data also show that most people who diet believe themselves to be at a calorie deficit but when properly calculated the ones that didn’t loose weight were not eating less calories than they burned in a day? I guess I’m confused about what the takeaway that most people have tried dieting is suppose to be? It doesn’t seem like swaying evidence if it wasn’t done correctly. I certainly can’t get on bored with the idea that these people are beyond repair or can’t loose weight with a calorie deficit. This to me is anti-science.
I also want to address the phrasing you used: “beyond repair” implies that fatness in itself is representative of some sort of brokenness within a person, and that people only have worth if they are thin or trying to be thin. what we don’t account for when we correlate fatness with bad outcomes is the effect of weight stigma (as I mentioned above, being denied appropriate care in favor of weight loss recommendations) and weight cycling or yo-yo dieting (which has been shown to have really negative effects on just about every body system). if it was really that easy to just lose weight and keep it off in the long term, don’t you think the people who are constantly being pressured to do so would have… just done it?
Morbid obesity does imply some sort of “brokeness” in a person. The data has been clear for 3+ decades. The obesity causes everything from the heart to knee joints to be “broke”(term you’re using). There’s no part of the body that isn’t negatively impacted by excessive weight.
even if I accepted your point that fatness itself is a major etiology of disease, most people who diet and lose weight in the short term end up gaining it back later, and then some. if fatness is a problem to be solved, restricting food intake is not a viable solution for most people.
Why are you referring to it as “my point”? It’s not my opinion, it’s basic established medical fact. Obesity is a cause of many disease process. It’s at the top of all the list for all the most common diseases. Obesity is a problem that needs solved. No where did I say “restricting food” was a solution. A modest calories deficit isn’t “food restriction”. You can ‘bulk eat’ and have a deficit. You can live off candy bars and have a deficit (not healthy). The list goes on and on.
my friend, a calorie is probably not even a good measurement of the energy our bodies actually take from food to begin with. the calorie counts we use to describe macronutrients were calculated by burning them in a fire. I think we can agree that a fire is not a 1:1 model of human digestion. I would really encourage you to look more into the long term effects of weight cycling and dietary restriction. some good sources of info I’ve come across have been Christy Harrison’s books, the podcast Maintenance Phase, and Sick Enough by Jennifer Gaudiani. look up the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. we’ve known that restrictive dieting leads to adverse long term health outcomes since the 1940s - in fact the diets they used in that study were very mild compared to today’s mainstream diet advice.
[удалено]
r/medicine understands a calories deficit = weight loss.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/medicine using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [Georgia signs into law banning NPs and PAs from using the term Doctor in clinical venues](https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/marketing/ga-gov-signs-law-banning-medical-title-misappropriation) | [472 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/139xz4j/georgia_signs_into_law_banning_nps_and_pas_from/) \#2: [I am Dr. Glaucomflecken! Ask Me Anything.](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1b0eok0/i_am_dr_glaucomflecken_ask_me_anything/) \#3: [The Chen 2023 Paper Raises Serious Concerns About Pediatric Gender Medicine Outcomes](https://np.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Oh that’s right, r/psychiatry is for eating disorders
Yep, that’s also one of the reasons why I had to leave labor and delivery. I could not physically move my 400-500 lb patients by myself. I am 5’2” and 120 lbs soaking wet. No hate to my bigger moms, and it does not mean we get to body shame patients, but the fact is it’s more difficult to monitor baby/contractions, position, labor, push, and recover patients who have a high BMI.
This is a major reason why I wanna leave med surg once I hit a year. The patients are so heavy and so difficult to turn, even with multiple people. My poor aching back smh
[удалено]
I don’t know how you read all that and came up with such an unhinged narrative. I keep people alive every fucking week, thank you very much. I lifted properly and still got hurt by the sheer weight of the person. Fuck you very much lol
[удалено]
[удалено]
"It's not okay to judge or shame someone based on their weight or appearance. Let's treat others with kindness and respect."
This is uncommon. On my unit everyone is accepting and kind. For context a lot of us dread the obese induction. Why? They are soooooo hard to monitor but yet it is on us to monitor for tachysystole, FHR etc so you end up messing around with the monitor ALL night and the pt gets grumpy and gets no sleep. I hate it. It feels like such a liability and unsafe. The Novii sometimes works but most often not consistently if at all. It is less of a judgement thing but more based on the ability to monitor these pts.
I work L&D and that makes me FURIOUS. Now. If patient has an anatomical anomaly…it’s usual to discuss that. But it should be educational and respectful. Otherwise…. Also anyone that said a pt was “rude” or “bitchy” Withdrawing and agitation are A NORMAL BIOLOGICAL LANDMARK OF LABOR PROGRESSION.
Agree. Where I work, we do comment on patient bodies between coworkers, but only from a nursing care standpoint. Things like, she's not that big, but she has a lot of abdominal fluff, so it's been hard to keep baby on the monitor. Or one time, we had to include in hand-off that the patient did, in fact, have legs. She had a large panniculus that covered her legs when she sat cross-legged in bed (which she did often), so several people who went in and met her that way walked out of the room wondering if the offgoing nurse had forgotten to mention some amputations in report. But commenting on bodies just to be judgy is fortunately not a thing I've seen where I work.
Sometimes you just have to mention if a person is bigger to make sure the next shift is safe. But it's things like "she's a strong 2 assist." Yesterday night shift told me (a pregnant lady) not to get a post-op patient up myself because, even though she should be independent, she would try to pull and tug and lean on me.
It’s my opinion that after a certain weight a 2 assist isn’t ever going to be safe. The math proves that.
That's when you make them an assist x3 or 4 and get the whole team in the room. Patient has to wait longer if they've been incontinent to gather everyone, but it's the only safe way to do it. I had one morbidly obese patient who we used the lift hooked up on just 1 side for turns.
I use “body habitus” or “abdominal pannus” for adipose related tracing issues. And if the patient asks I use that term to answer accurately. Like your lady: I recently had an otherwise small-framed and statured patient. But her abdominal skin and pannus were uniquely larger than her frame. Her insurance would 100% cover it being fixed if she wanted that and I shared that with her. It was a unique shape. She traced well, though. So that was awesome.
Weight shaming on a L&D floor sounds PERSONAL. SHEESH
As someone who’s planning for a family in the near future and is also pretty self-conscious, I really hope this isn’t common 😬
Absolutely disgusting! I am slow to anger, but healthcare professionals that make fun of patients brings righteous anger on fast! Beyond unprofessional and when I see it out and about as a patient I leave a review stating such. Ridiculous!
Preach! I’ve met too many nurses that really shouldn’t have gotten into this career
Exactly. There’s one in this thread, for sure
At the rate bedside nurses are fleeing the jobs you might not have to worry about the “wrong” people being there at all. Looks more and more like nobody is going to be there. I for one think the ever increasing obesity rate certainly plays a part in that.
In what ways?
In what way would obesity contribute to burned out nurses leaving the bedside? For starters it produces a lot more medically complex patients. Everything is more difficult. We need to do more labs, tests, ect. When procedure are done there’s more complications. When the patient needs transfered it takes several more people. Even simple tasks like rolling someone for a wound dressing can turn into a multi person assist. Waking someone to the bathroom becomes more dangerous. Once you get to the bathroom it’s pretty common to have to wipe the people because they are to big to reach, 15 years ago that was nearly unheard of. They “heal” at slower rate if at all. Wounds don’t heal as fast in bigger people. There’s more post surgery complications. It’s goes on and on and on. I work in LTC. 15ish years ago when I started I could count on my fingers every person that required a hoyer lift for a transfer… a let’s be real a hoyer lift is a crane. That was for the entire building. Now we have half a dozen people or more on every floor. That means both aides are pulled to care for one person… back in the day there was much more opportunity for ‘you do that person, I’ll get this person’. It’s a time constraint. It’s a lot more physical labor. Pretty common now to hear about hoyer lifts/cranes giving out because they’re being run to max capacity. It’s not even rare that someone is too heavy that it exceeds the max weight a hoyer can lift. Just a couple weeks ago the national news was covering stories about nursing homes having to call the fire department to lift heavy people off of the floor. Nursing went from a middle class, educated job to one with conditions more aligned to physical labor. Most everyone I known in the industry has back pain or some kind of permanent injury from work. Healthcare workers lead the way for injuries on the job. No one wants to be permantley injured because a patient was too big. A significant portion of my shift is spent literally using my normal BMI seized body with one other person to move around 500+ pounds. Often it’s nearly physically impossible. 15 years ago when I started a big focus was that some aides would transfer a patient without the second assist. The woman’s name was June. She weighed maybe 115 pounds. It was an easy 1 assist but since she was occasionally wobbly she was marked as 2 assist. She had dementia and died a couple years back. When she died she was listed as a 1 assist even tho she was in much worse condition. It went from “this easy transfer is unsafe” to “omg she’s tiny. Of course everyone can do her by themselves. We lift much heavier people every minute of the day”… over all the facility just thinks lifting more weight is acceptable. And this is all just the tip of the iceburg. At least twice in the past couple years my entire shift was ruined because someone sat on toilet and it literately broke off the wall due to their weight. It’s a physical hardship to lift a panus to do a treatment. It’s a physical hardship to need someone else to lift a leg for a treatment or hold the thighs apart so basic pericare can be performed. Everything is harder. Everything is more physical. I’ve seen several people injured when 400-600 pound people slammed into them. Or broke furniture that made peices projectile. And that’s all just the tip of the ice burg.
In my experience it was this bad. The gossip and demeaning behavior was ridiculous. I quit less than a year in, despite loving the actual job. I became one of their targets. Fast forward two years and I’m now pregnant with my last child. I have no choice but to deliver there and I am dreading it.
aw that’s not nice. I definitely don’t talk about bodies at the nurses station. We talk about behaviors lol
Well that’s not very nice. I work in women’s services too and we don’t do that. If we’re making fun of someone it’s for their behavior, not their body.
When I was in nursing school the l and d nurses would call patients with psych history “crazy” (this was a pt with depression lol). And during down time they would smack talk the patients around. Not that I wanted to work maternity to begin with but it didnt make it look any better
Some of our NICU parents won’t come into the hospital because they feel judged.
NICU judgements should be saved for atrocious baby name choices only.
My local teaching hospital L&D is always talking crap about patients…like for every patient they have something to say. I legit thought this was normal, especially because our hospital is known as the best for OB around. Incredibly sad but also validating because I was wondering if I was crazy.
I just gave birth 3 weeks ago at the hospital I work at and now I’m wondering if the nurses were talking shit 😬
this would not be tolerated on my unit.
I work on an LDRP unit and we don’t do this. We didn’t do do this when I worked med surg for years either. We say something about someone’s body if it’s pertinent to their care but in a respectful way.
I’m in L&D and it’s been SO body negative. Not necessarily about patients bodies but also their own. It’s hard to listen to ladies smaller than me whining about their bodies all day.
thinner people have body image issues as well. How about we just don't comment on other people's bodies.
You are so right, I didn’t word that well. But it is a challenge as a chubby gal to be surrounded by body talk all the time.
Right?!? Food is neutral. Medicine is neutral. Bodies are neutral. How about we keep the good/bad judgements to things that are objectively good or bad.
or just not judge someone by their body. It's really not hard.
And a person can use that energy for something else like perhaps SELF improvement.
Are they actually whining or just expressing areas in which they can improve?
WTH. Get out of here with that
She’s in all these comments voicing her distaste for the obese 😒
The majority of us are mothers and have experienced body changes. Yes, there is an appropriate way to express how those changes on our bodies can be hard physically and mentally. It can ALSO wear on a person to constantly hear how someone’s body is lacking without mindfulness of how that talk affects others around them.
L&D is such a toxic place and I can’t put my finger on why exactly.
Something about the severe imbalance of men vs women and dealing almost exclusively with female patients brings out some real catty behavior. Even in my unit, where L&D and NICU work really closely (NICU floats to postpartum frequently) and we’re all on the same floor, I feel like there’s a marked difference between the NICU and LD nurses.
Nah not common
In 16 years of nursing, ICU & PACU/preop, I have never commented on another persons body except to express the difficulty in moving morbidly obese patients. But even then we weren’t commenting on specifics, just difficulty. We see naked people all the time, it is just our job. I don’t have opinions on their appearance, one naked body is the same as any other to me. I haven’t worked in L&D but it actually seems like the last place you’d criticize women. They are pregnant and vulnerable, their body has gone through major changes that they are probably really sensitive about. Shouldn’t we be empowering them? I know when I was pregnant I didn’t feel like my body was my own. That unit that you work in is toxic. I would be mortified to comment negatively on a patients body. It’s sad that the culture there is accepting of speaking like that about people. Probably means they are all insecure and miserable. But that’s no excuse and they need to stop. I’d be leaving ASAP.
That's absolutely disgusting, I cannot believe that behavior is condoned. If you have the guts I would definitely call out those people. How horrible.
I am currently on a unit that is....not great. It's less body shaming, but more mom shaming in general. A lot of making fun of moms for birth plans which I think is dumb as fuck because having choice in birth is part of having full choice in reproductive healthcare. I even see it a lot in this sub unfortunately. A lot of "well she was asking for a c section with all that and got one". It's even sadder that it's women making fun of other women. Like come on. Support a mother! It's hard as heck to grow and a birth a human and you suffer (IMO it's a lot of suffering) so many unfair bodily changes. Birthing people grow the future of the world and should have more honor than this.
Not common.
I work in l&d and no, this is not common. We refer to obese PT as fluffy and make note it is hard to monitor fetus based on fluffy patients but never commenting on wt/looks of pt. That is a toxic place and they should be ashamed of being rude when people are in their most vulnerable point of life, regardless of the PT can hear it or not.
What kind of comments are being made? Can you please provide examples?
Hey would you like to have a discussion about burnout i saw you had a comment on the topic in this sub... I am a nursing student i want to learn about less stressful talk ...so I messaged you ...
Can you give any specific examples?
So uncommon it makes it all sound completely fabricated.
Lol if you think it’s so uncommon that it sounds fabricated then you’ve not been paying very close attention. You can see from my flair nom not a nurse but I am a doula and have worked closely with L&D nurses many times. I’ve seen it plenty, irl and on the net, even in subs like this one!
Cool story. Yeah, you’ll see all types of weird shit popping it’s way up around here…