Well, it's finally happened........I've met her at last.......the only patient I have ever truly disliked.
I've long been famous for getting along with some of the most aggressive, petty, mean, combative, rude, hostile, nasty, abusive patients ever to come through our hospital doors. "Kill 'em with kindness" is my motto, and even if I couldn't make such a patient turn into a pussycat, I could at least keep them from killing ME. I've never been hit, and other than having a man who wasn't allowed to see his crack-addicted newborn threaten to shoot me, I've rarely been scared at work. (That's not to say I haven't dodged a few kicks, as well as a telemetry unit that was thrown at me by an 80-pound LOL.)
But now I've experienced it: caring for a patient I can neither stand, nor get along with. She came in over a week ago, this middle school teacher (who happens to work at my 12-year-old's school:eek: ), for an open cholecystectomy.......should have been no more than 3 days, but her pain was a 12 out of 10, so she ended up with an epidural. Then her legs were numb, so she couldn't walk. So we turned the epidural down, and the pain came roaring back, and in the meantime she's whining about the room temperature, the bed, the food, the nurses, the roommates, the visiting hours, the physical therapists, on and on, ad nauseam.
OK, I thought, I can deal with this. But I spent over half my shift in that room and STILL couldn't do anything right......she accused me, as well as the rest of the nursing staff, of being clumsy and incompetent and uncaring. (Me, uncaring??! I've NEVER been accused of that in my entire career.) I busted my hump doing everything I could to make her comfortable, and nothing was enough.
Then yesterday, I was caring for her roommate, a perfectly nice TKR patient (I'd assigned Ms. Complainer to another nurse) and this woman just kept going on and on to her visitors about how all of us were just "unbelievable" and the care "terrible". I put my patient on a bedpan because I didn't have the time or the help to take her out of the CPM machine while serving dinner, and off the woman went again: "God, these people are so lazy, my roommate couldn't get up to the bathroom because the nurse wouldn't unhook something!" A few minutes later, she demanded that I not touch her food tray since my hands were dirty from handling the bedpan (DUH), then told me to spray some room freshener around because of the "urine smell". I had to look in four different rooms to find some, then when I went to the middle of the room to spray, she yelled at me, "DON'T SPRAY THAT STUFF IN MY FOOD!! GOD, ARE YOU PEOPLE COMPLETELY STUPID?!"
Well, I wasn't anywhere near her OR her food when I was doing this, and I couldn't help gritting my teeth when I said, "YOU were the one who asked for the spray, and as you can see, I'm over HERE." I had to leave the room just then, because I was about to explode, and she was proceeding to show off again to her visitors how disgusted she was with the hospital, how NOTHING had gone right, etc. "I know I'm just being b****y", she sighed, and her visitors just petted her and told her she had the right to be, because of all she'd been through, poor thing, yada, yada..........:angryfire
Where's that puking smilie when you need it?
All I know is, I'm sure glad she's not one of my son's teachers.......I'd like to think she's not that way at work, but I'm afraid that if he ever does end up in one of her classes, I'm gonna pull him out of there!!
Thanks for letting me rant. I feel better now.:)
Hellllllo Nurse, BSN, RN
2 Articles; 3,563 Posts
I'm sure, you're not a nurse.
BTW, being in the hospital is about recovering, not how pleasant the food is. Nurses have no control whatsoever over the food. Write a letter to the CEO, troll.