Here, for your enjoyment, are twenty more things nurses wish they never had to say:
1) To the CNA: "Uh-oh........it looks like Mrs. Chambers hasn't had a BM in nine days."
2) To the patient with Munchausen's Syndrome: "No, I can't give you any more pain medicine," when what you'd really like is to swack him up with enough Dilaudid to shut him up about his manufactured miseries for a few hours.
3) To co-workers, upon seeing a frequent flyer coming up in the elevator: "Oh, Lordy......look at what the cat dragged in."
4) To the MD: "You want me to do WHAT?"
5) To your best friend's 10-year-old: "No, Eric, you're not a dork. Everybody gets their big toe stuck in the bathtub faucet at least once."
6) To a frantic grandparent calling to ask what to do about the thirteen-month-old who just consumed one of their Pall Malls: "How soon can you get him to the hospital?"
7) To any mother: "Your child has head lice."
? To your son who's faking illness to get out of going to school: "If there's no blood, no broken bones, and no passing out, I'm not impressed." (You're tempted to introduce him to your Munchausen's patient so he can see what happens to malingerers.)
9) To the babysitter: "I'm sorry, I can't pick up the kids yet.......got another half-hour of charting to do........I'll be there as soon as I can."
10) To your husband: "Not tonight, honey, I've got a backache."
11) To your boss: "Why, of course I'll pull a double tonight."
12) To the patient with a six-inch-long screwdriver in his rectum: "What were you thinking?!", because you really want to know why a full-grown man would put such an object in an orifice that was intended as an EXIT rather than an entry.
13) To your spouse: "Sorry, honey, looks like I'm working late again.....don't worry about fixing me anything, I'll just grab something at Mickey D's on the way home."
14) To the confused resident who keeps asking you about her cat---which has probably been dead for the past 30 years---as you push your med cart down the hall: "I'm sure Fluffy is somewhere around the neighborhood, Mrs. Jones, but I really can't go with you to look for her right now."
15) To any GYN patient: "Can you please scoot down.......a little more........a little more.......there." Every woman alive knows what "scoot down" means, and believe me, nurses don't like the stirrups any better than patients do!
16) To the unit secretary: "I'm sorry to bug you, Tina, but I reallyreallyreallyreallyREALLY need these orders processed right away, couldya please put them in ASAP, huh, couldya, pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top? Thanks, you're a doll!"
17) To PT/OT/ST: "Next time you take my patient off the floor, would you please let me know so I don't freak out when I can't find him?" (I used to LOATHE this habit of theirs when I was working in acute care. I hope it's gotten better in the years since I left....but somehow I doubt it.)
18) To the new parents flummoxed by the car seat they are supposed to take their baby home in: "Uh...excuse me. Do you know how to use that thing?" (Because that obligates you to teach them to use it.....oy.)
19) To the idiot-sticks who run long-term care pharmacies: "You're the fifth person in the past hour who's called to ask me the same questions about that medication. Don't you people ever TALK to one another?"
20) To the Grand Pooh-Bahs who have never walked a hard linoleum floor in our battered NurseMates: "Oh, of COURSE I don't mind standing while I chart/working an entire 12-hour shift without eating or peeing/turning bariatric patients on my own/running back and forth to find equipment/fill in the blank."
After all, we are nurses, and we love what we do.........right? RIGHT?? 
