Good morning, all! I'm not completely new to allnurses, but new to this group. I'm a newly licensed LVN working as a nurse in an elementary school.
I've figured out quickly that there is a huge learning curve as far as practicing nursing in a school vs a hospital/clinic. I have children of my own and tend to use a "would this alarm me as a parent?" as my approach to whether or not to call parents.
So on Thursday I had a 3rd grader come to me at the end of the day with a rear ankle scrape. She was NOT bleeding. She had a bandage on in the area already, so I asked her to show me what I was supposed to be looking at, and she pulled down her sock and she pointed to a cut just below the existing bandage. I cleaned it and placed a bandaid over it and sent her back to class to get her backpack since school was out. And just to reiterate, she'd walked downstairs and across the entire school to my office with absolutely no bleeding. So I documented such, waited for my daughter, and left.
The next morning I walk into the front office with the mother standing there, and she proceeds to yell in my face and tell me I'm incompetent, and that she's am MA and even she knew the cut would need stitches (stitches?! What I saw was a typical ankle scrape... It almost looked the way ankles look while breaking in new shoes). And that I was trying to cut corners so I could go home. To which I didn't reply, but was thinking that I never take a lunch breaks and frequently stay late (unpaid) to work while my kids are in after school care. But how would she know that? She just wanted to go with her wild assumptions and berate me. She was shoving a picture in my face to which I couldn't reply honestly as it would have gotten me into trouble. Honestly, I would never have taken my child to the ER for a 1" ankle scrape, but whatever. And as I said before, the girl had managed to walk quite a bit to get to my office without any bleeding, and yet this mother was claiming her daughter had a saturated sock 5 minutes later? The only thing I can think of was that the ridge of her shoe maybe made it worse?It was also the end of the day, and I'd even asked the girl if she went to after school care or was being picked up, and she said her mom was there! I also spoke with her teacher who said that after it happened, she put a bandage on and she continued working on her science project. Her teacher said it had some blood right after, but none post-bandage nor none when the girl returned to get her backpack.
I guess this this is more of a vent than anything, but I was really upset and embarrassed to have someone yelling at me like that in the front office in front of everyone. When I told my district nurse about it, she just rolled her eyes and said that some parents are crazy and just enjoy escalating things, and to not take it personally. Sure hard not to, though!
So originally I thought this in no way warranted a call to parent, but had I been psychic of this girl having a nutty mom, I sure would have called!
