The following two incidents happened a while ago, but took so much out of me that I haven't been able to bear re-hashing them until now...

A patient who is dying of pancreatic cancer has been admitted to our floor a few times. His wife is, of course, devastated and isn't coping well at all. Essentially, nothing that anyone does for her or her husband is ever enough or satisfactory. Objectively, I realize that this is her way of dealing with losing control over her life and her husband's illness, but boy can it become frustrating. She was constantly lurking the halls, waving down any passing nurse for one thing or another. She had honestly become such a bother that her husband, the actual patient, was getting pretty sick of her and her antics. On one particular day when I was in charge, a coworker of mine was taking care of this patient. His wife came in, and when she did, the patient rolled his eyes and looked the other way. The patient had been scheduled for a CT that day, and the wife was getting herself worked up about why he was going for this exam. Right as this was happening, transport rolled up with a cart to take the patient down to CT. When my coworker announced their arrival, the wife freaked out and demanded to know why he was going down and begged for the test to be rescheduled. While this seems like a fairly simple thing to do, it's not at all, so Kim left the room for a minute to see if she could rearrange things. When she returned, she found one of our oncologists in the room, prying a handful of pills from the wife's hands while she threatened to take them all and kill herself. None of us have ever been presented with such a situation before (someone in the hospital who is not an admitted patient but requires immediate intervention), but luckily everyone teamed up and made a number of important phone calls that brought all the right people together within about 10 minutes. We had our nurses, the patient's medicine attending, a psychiatric resident, the psychiatric nurse liason, security, and a few others on board. Risk management had been called, and the plan was to calmly explain to the patient's wife that we needed to take her down to the ER to get a psychiatric evaluation. If she refused or put up a fight, security was going to have to forcible take her there. At first she refused, but eventually agreed to walk herself down there with this team of professionals escorting her. Then, of course, we are stuck with trying to decide whether the patient is safe to go home with her. For better or worse, she got cleared by psych and the patient actually went home with her later that day.