What would you do?

[Soph_LPN]

I just started a job at a Pediatric Clinic through and agency and everything has been wonderful. I love this job and the people who work there. Yesterday around 4 or 5 I started feeling awful..chest congestion...never ending cough...high fever. I finished work and went home to sleep it off. I woke up this morning and felt a little better but still had a fever. I called my agency and explained the situation and said I felt I shouldn't be working around kids and babies with a fever and with how I felt. Well an hour later my agency lady calls and sounds very irritated and says well I called the clinic and the nurses are going to have to work together to take care of your doctors appointments that day. She also wanted to know if I was feeling better and if there was a chance I could go in. She was not very happy with me I could tell...Anyways I never get sick..I never call in sick. I just happened to get sick the second week into my new job!! How would you guys handled the situation? Would you have went in? I know it looks bad now to everyone and the doctor I work with that I called in sick 2 weeks in..I don't want them to think I am unreliable.

[Recuerdo]

Dear God, yes, we do need to stand up for one another. Sometimes the expectations that people have of nurses are insane, and that is a form of emotional violence that should no longer be permitted.

I recently had an incident happen to me where that kind of guilt trip was dumped on me by a co-worker. I am 56 years old and have been an RN for 35 years. I went home that night in tears and spent an hour talking to the nursing supervisor and to my manager, and nearly resigned. The issue was about my "not spending enough time" with some patient who wanted to argue about her pain medication when I had another patient next door who was about to become unconscious due to a low blood sugar. Unfortunately for me, the patient wanting pain medication (which I'd rushed to bring) was related to the unit secretary and this made one of my nurse co-workers very mad, so she decided to rip me to pieces when I complained that the patient scratched me until I had welts on my hand and arm when I tried to take the narcotics back to the med cart because it is illegal to leave them at the bedside if someone won't take them.

I am sick to death of things like this. It was my first day on our new computer system that had just recently gone live and I was overwhelmed by my assignment and by all that was happening. Luckily my charge nurse helped me out with my assignment or I never would have seen my other patients for about the first three hours of the busy afternoon shift.

People may expect us to be Godlike and flawless and think that we can be in five places at once, but the reality is that we cannot. And if people cannot accept that reality, then that is THEIR problem, not ours. I am still hurt and angry about the incident and I am fearful every time I must return to work. I pray and meditate every day to try and deal with this nonsense. But when I spoke with my manager, I made it clear that I was not about to take the brunt for the feelings of whoever thinks they were so badly hurt in the situation I had to deal with BECAUSE I DID THE BEST I COULD AND WENT OUT OF MY WAY to be helpful. I could have just let that patient wait for her pain meds. But I tried to be there.

We work in hostile and paranoid environments where family members and visitors who are uneducated and demanding are often present, holding their guns to our heads. We need to stand tall and walk tall because we are the licenscees who must determine what our priorities are, and no one else has that right, even though corporate medicine has tried to take it away from us by having unrestricted visiting hours etc...so that they can be more "competitive".

But the art and science of nursing and medicine and the realities that go along with it are still alive, whether they like it or not.

Thank you, my friend, for saying what needed to be said.