40 Nurses Joined This Viral Twitter Thread Sharing What Their Older Patients Have Confessed To Them

It seems that Twitter user zorn really said what a lot of people were wondering about, or genuinely related to, as his tweet amassed 371k likes and got nearly 2k responses, which included just surprised-Pikachu-face reactions or people’s own stories of hearing or witnessing some awful things.

The user zorn whose tweet went viral has been a nurse for three years and worked on a med surg floor for the whole of his career. When Bored Panda reached out to him, he said that he loves working there. He said they "see patients of all ages with a huge variety of backgrounds and diagnoses." Some personal facts about zorn are that he lives with his wonderful girlfriend and they have "three perfect cats."

We asked if zorn was surprised to see how much attention his tweet received and his response was "Not at all! I talk about work fairly often on Twitter, and have definitely never had any response of close to this magnitude. I always do my best to avoid any patient identifiers and to maintain patient privacy and adhere to HIPAA."

He puts out the tweets witjout having any malicious intents, "It's important to have somewhere to vent about work and kind of shout into the void. It's a hard job. And it's hard to talk to people in my real life about it."

There were a lot of people responding to zorn's tweet with their own stories and the author of the original tweet says, "I think nurses are in a unique position. We are one of the most trusted professionals. And we build relationships with patients when we care for them multiple shifts. We're some of the only people they see while they're in the hospital, sometimes. And they're in a sort of vulnerable position that I feel like makes confessions more likely. Plus, nurses are more likely than a lot of professions to be around people when they're altered in some way or another-- delirious, or coming out of anesthesia, or suffering from dementia, or on certain medications."

If you’re not in the field, you wouldn’t think that people become so talkative and spill all their secrets that are really serious and you don’t even know if they are for real or just messing with you.

zorn guesses why nurses sometimes become confessors, "I do feel like there's a trust and intimacy in the patient/nurse relationship that makes confessions of one nature another more likely. In cases where patients are talking about relationships, or traumas they've experienced, it's a privilege to be able to help them carry that burden. Being trusted like that is an honor."

Nurses working with elderly people shared how they confessed to them of love affairs and abuse, whether they were the abuser or were being abused, and surprisingly, a lot of people wanted to clear their conscience of murders.

Surely some of them will be just the brain playing tricks on older people as the mind becomes not as sharp as it used to be. Illnesses like dementia and Alzheimer’s damage memories to the point that people will not feel the distinction between reality and movies they’ve seen.

According to zorn, most of the confessions are not that serious, but "the confessions of a more violent nature are definitely more shocking, but at the same time, I kind of just have to carry on with my day, so these shocking things sort of fall in with everything else and get filed away in my brain. All of the patients that have talked about harm to another person either have dementia, or for one reason or another it's impossible to verify, or they already went to trial and were unable to be prosecuted for one reason or another. That sort of thing. If people ever confess to wanting to harm to themselves or others, I have to report that, and I have have report any suspected child or elder abuse."

The nurse couldn't say which story shocked him the most, but what he got from this exerience was feeling a sense of community. He remarked, "It was really cool while reading responses. I was glad I wasn't alone in this."

The last thing that he would like to add was "I do want to say that vaccines are safe and effective, and COVID-19 has devastating short term and long term effects in people of all ages, so if more folks could get vaccinated, that would make me sleep easier."

What do you think of these stories? If you have any of your own, we and other pandas would be very interested to read them, so leave them in the comments. Also, show us which ones surprised you the most by upvoting them!