Hi, my name is AngelfireRN, I'll be your nurse tonight.
I am not a waitress, nor am I your slave.
Yelling and hurling obscenities at me will not get you your pain meds any sooner than they are ordered. Nor will having your family member or entourage do the same.
Threatening lawsuits and having umpteen family members camp out in the halls or hold up the nurse's station will not get you preferential treatment.
Physically grabbing me as I go down the hall is NOT a good idea.
I do not give the orders, but I do have to follow/enforce them. This is something that you should take up with your doctor.
No, I will not call him again to ask him for more pain medicine. He has been called twice and has said no both times.
No, I will not give you his number so you can "straighten him out".
No, you are not my only patient, and I highly doubt that you are single-handedly paying my salary. On the off chance that you are, let's talk about a raise.
NO, NO, NO, I most empahatically will NOT come get you when it is time for your next pain shot while you are having a smoke break. I also will not bring it to you in the smoking room. (Have actually said that, I am allergic to cigarettes. I did it once, had an asthma attack, desatted to 83, and turned blue, according to the patient and my charge nurse, after the patient had to help me back to the floor).
No, I don't really care if your family has not eaten all day, they drove here by themselves, they are not sick, and no, I will not call for 6 guest trays. (This of course, is if the patient in question does not need all 6 family members present, and is not at death's door).
No, you may not have 3 six-packs of soda from the kitchen, there are other people that would like a snack, too.
No, they will not open up the kitchen up just for you, at 1 in the morning, because you don't like the snacks we have on the floor.
I could think of hundreds, but those will do for a start. I know it sounds mean, but this is why I got out of bedside nursing. When a hospital becomes the Hilton, I'm gone!
Sitting around relaxing is NOT the way to get better. You need to work at it.
I actually said this to her today. I told her if she didn't get moving she would end up in a nursing home! (bad Pepper).
Were you my grandmother's nurse? She once refused to get out of bed after surgery, and this kind of thing happened to her! Since she was NOT ready for a nursing home yet, she did as she was told.
A while back, I read a humorous e mail list of rules, created by an ER nurse. The idea was that patients tend to have certain misconceptions about emergency treatment (among them the idea that a hospital emergency department is basically just a glorified minor care clinic, but that's a topic for another thread).
Inspired by the list, I added some of my own "rules":
___Don't call ahead and ask to reserve a place. ERs don't take reservations.
___Don't call to check which doctors are on tonight, before coming in. It's a red flag to staff that you may be looking for easy access to narcotics.
___Ditto if you tell the nurse that you're allergic to every pain killer under the sun except Dilaudid and Demerol. There are a few people out there who actually have such allergies, but they don't tend to present to ERs three times a week with vague complaints of back pain.
___The purpose of triage is to get a QUICK idea of what's going on with you, and what kind of resources you're likely to need. A concise description like "Chest pain," or "I think I have something stuck in my rectum," fills that purpose very well. Going into detail about all the symptoms you've been experiencing since February usually does not.
___If you're receiving IV narcotics in the ER, you cannot drive yourself home. Period. And, no, we won't believe you if you claim you have a friend sitting in the parking lot waiting to drive you home, who can't come in because she's in her pajamas.
___Please go ahead and treat your child's fever before bringing him in. We promise to believe you, even if the fever is gone by the time you get here.
___Don't bother to get dressed up for us---we're probably just going to make you take it all off, anyway.
___When you're given a hospital gown and asked to put it on, please remove your clothes first. Otherwise, the gown serves no purpose. ;>)
___If you have time and energy to take phone calls or text messages during your triage and examination, then you probably don't qualify as a medical emergency.
___If you're bringing in a friend or family member with migraine, nausea or vomiting, please be considerate and don't eat smelly nacho chips and candy bars in front of him.
___If you present with a complaint of severe migraine yourself, you'll probably be taken more seriously if you refrain from immediately turning on the TV, asking for a snack and cheerfully chatting on your cell phone.
___If your infant is vomiting, please don't try to fix it by pushing a bottle of formula into his mouth.
___No, the hospital does not provide free cab service home. Neither do its employees. And, just in case you were wondering......
___No, the ER doesn't provide free beds for the night. Or free meals. Or free toiletry kits. Or free scrub suits. Or free bed baths. Or free crutches.
___Please don't get excited if your blood pressure is on the high side. Blood pressures have a way of going up when people walk into an emergency department. (That goes for the staff's blood pressures, too.)
___Don't tell the triage nurse you're vomiting blood, if what you mean is that you saw a tiny red streak in the toilet after vomiting. That's just vomiting. Vomiting blood is----well, vomiting BLOOD.
___Note to new parents: one instance of spitting up a glob of milk or formula doesn't necessarily constitute a medical emergency.
___The old saw, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," doesn't apply in the ER. In the ER, the wheel that's fallen off the axle and broken into a million pieces gets the grease. Mere squeaks----even loud, obnoxious squeaks-----have to wait a while longer for their grease.
___If we ask you for a urine specimen, please provide it ASAP, rather than pretending for 3 hours that you can't go. We are not cops, and in most cases we're not looking for drugs in your urine.
___Please keep a list of your medications, plus dosages, and bring it with you whenever you go to the ER. It doesn't give us much to work with if you say, "I don't know what it's for, but it's round and white, it starts with a C, and the doctor told me it's very important not to skip any doses."
If we ask you for a urine specimen, please provide it ASAP, rather than pretending for 3 hours that you can't go. We are not cops, and in most cases we're not looking for drugs in your urine.
Actaully, my bladder has a bad habit of shutting down on me when asked to provide specimans. Its really shy and just won't cooperate! True story - had an appointment for a physcial once after work. Drank lots and lots and lot before appointment. Did not pee all day. Went to appointment - couldn't pee. Nope. Nothing. Left the office - wasn't 1/2 block away when had to pee so badly I barely made it to a public washroom!
We have standing orders to straight cath if the patient can't give a specimen within 30 minutes. In actual practice, we don't push it that much unless the doctor insists on it. But there are some situations (for example, some trauma patients) in which you need to get a urine specimen ASAP. And, when a patient comes in with abdominal/flank pain, it's nice to be able to rule out UTI before going on to more expensive or invasive tests.
Specializes in Clinical Research, Outpt Women's Health.
"Yes, you really do have to take out all your piercings. No, I will not pay for them if they close up. Why are you so concerned with those holes in your body when you planned on being dead today?"
i was asked this question by 2 pts last week and arrrrrggggggghhhhh....
"me english no good, do you speaka portuguese?" i said "no i do not"
(i do not look latino, i am irish and french!)
what i wanted to say........ i don't speaka portuguese because this is america and here we speaka english, the language of the land!!!
our dr will reschedule you (and he does this to all people who don't bring an interpreter) if you fail to bring an interpreter.
uh oh, now you've opened up a can of worms. i have rather strong feelings on this issue, and they're not very "politically correct."
first, do you have a telephone translator language line? that's what i use, when the patient is having trouble understanding english. problem solved, more or less.
second, it's true that this is the united states---but there is no law that only english speaking patients may be treated in u.s. health care facilities. as nurses, it's our job to care for the patient----not to sit in judgment of his/her language skills.
third, what might be a very adequate command of english in everyday situations isn't necessarily so when technical terms and concepts are being thrown around. for example, i'm quite capable of reserving hotel rooms, ordering meals, making small talk and filing police reports in french, but i'm considerably less fluent if the talk turns to physiology or medical tests. add to that that it's much harder to express oneself in another language when one is tired, scared, sick, in pain, or otherwise stressed.....and you have several very good reasons a patient might not be able to communicate in english as well as you'd like him/her to.
now, i'm going to get clobbered for this, but i'll say it anyway: i don't think it would hurt most of us americans to put forth a bit more effort in learning to communicate with foreign-born patients. coexisting with those who speak a different language is everyday reality in most of the rest of the world, and i truly don't understand why we americans have such an issue with it.
I'd like to be on one of them death panels that Sarah made up so I could tell families, " We aren't going to pay to keep your comatose vent / dialysis dependent Mom alive anymore. Now, would y'all like to get out your checkbook or say goodbye now".
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
i was asked this question by 2 pts last week and arrrrrggggggghhhhh....
"me english no good, do you speaka portuguese?" i said "no i do not"
(i do not look latino, i am irish and french!)
what i wanted to say........ i don't speaka portuguese because this is america and here we speaka english, the language of the land!!!
our dr will reschedule you (and he does this to all people who don't bring an interpreter) if you fail to bring an interpreter.
wow! the doctor will reschedule you if you don't speak english and don't bring an interpreter?! good for her/him! i wish we could do that in the hospital. i can understand the necessity for a real interpreter for conversations such as "you have a blockage in your coronary artery and you need bypass surgery" or "we need to do a lady partsl ultrasound to see why you're having this bleeding" or "you have cancer." but for things like "do you need to use the bedpan?" or "i'll bring your pain medication in an hour, because that's the soonest you can have it" a family member or friend would do.
the problem is, interpreters come out of our unit budget. we spend so much on interpreters for folks who have lived here for decades and haven't bothered to learn the language that we cannot afford the lifting help we need. if folks don't bother to bring their own interpreter, perhaps they ought to try out just how much english they can muster after 20 years in new york!
the problem is, interpreters come out of our unit budget. we spend so much on interpreters for folks who have lived here for decades and haven't bothered to learn the language that we cannot afford the lifting help we need. if folks don't bother to bring their own interpreter, perhaps they ought to try out just how much english they can muster after 20 years in new york!
what makes you so sure the patient hasn't "bothered" to try to learn english? or that the patient could easily have brought along someone who could interpret, but just didn't "bother" to?
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
what makes you so sure the patient hasn't "bothered" to try to learn english? or that the patient could easily have brought along someone who could interpret, but just didn't "bother" to?
admittedly, i don't know any of that for sure. i'm just going from past experience with my ex-husband's family who brag that they've been in the country for 40 years and have never had to learn english. their grasp of the english language is proportional to how much they like what they're hearing. and they brag about that, too.
:lol2:
rph3664
1,714 Posts
Were you my grandmother's nurse? She once refused to get out of bed after surgery, and this kind of thing happened to her!
Since she was NOT ready for a nursing home yet, she did as she was told.