What's Your Sign Baby?

[AutumnApple]

Something that was said on another thread reminded me of an incident I had when I was on clinicals as a student.

Sock puppets.

Got your attention?

Here is what happened:

My clinical group was doing it's rotation on a M/S unit with tele. This specific unit utilized Telemetry Techs (is that the right word?). The techs would watch the monitors, take care of beeping that was just a result of the pt disconnecting (for instance, to go to the bathroom) types of things and of course alert the nurse if there was a problem.

One of the techs was a middle aged man, I say....oh, 35ish. He was always joking with the nurses which at first seemed nice. We can all use some humor in the day, right? Not his humor. I noticed the nurses often gave him the cold shoulder, or just gave him one word responses while he was carrying on. To be honest, his jokes weren't funny so, I wrote it off as that being the reason for it all.

Nope. There was more. He was a creep. One day he kept following me around with a sock puppet and flirting with me. The sock puppet would say "Hey, you're cute" then he'd apologize for his friend's rudeness. On and on he kept going and all my social ques that he was annoying me went ignored.

Then he started with the "Hi, I'm ToeRiffic, what's your name? I like long walks on the beach, country music, romantic dinners at McDonald's................."

Thank goodness the nurse assigned to the patient I was watching stepped in at this point. She was so casual and smooth about it too: "Oh, hi Autumn. I see you're going to do the dressing our patient is ordered. Why don't you go introduce yourself to the patient while I get your instructor so she can have a little chat with our tech here. I'll be in to join you in just a few."

I loved my clinical instructor at the time. She was detail oriented without being OCD, if that makes sense. Smart too, loved how she always seemed to know what was going to happen before it did. Well, I don't know what she said to that tech but for the remainder of our rotation that semester, he never once rose from his seat or approached another student.

So, we're all aware of how nursing is often turned into a sex symbol thing. Some in the general public still believe this nonsense and think all flirting with nurses is always appreciated.

What's your story about being flirted with while you were nursing?

What'd you do?

[TheCommuter, BSN, RN]

About five or six years ago I was doing a head-to-toe assessment on a s/p CVA male patient in his 50s at the specialty rehab hospital where I worked at the time.

I asked him, "Can I touch your feet? I need to assess your pulses."

He allowed me to assess his pulses, but not before smiling while pointing to my breasts and saying, "Can I touch those?"

[mrsboots87]

One of my jobs is in LTC with little old men with dementia so.....

Move been groped, kissed on the cheek while they were aiming for the mouth, been scooped, you name it. I always tell them it's in appropriate behavior, redirect, and then work more carefully with those types, even if sometimes it can be a little funny for lack of a better word.

Anyway, the worst I ever dealt with was a older man with vascular dementia. He was deteriorating quickly. His most major problem was a sever lack of impulse control and he had no filter. He was constantly saying incredibly perverted and nasty things. I was a CNA at the time and was giving peri care after a loose BM. He like me dead in the eye and said "Ooh, you like that baby." Gotta love LTC and the awkward conversations with demented old men.

[NICU Guy, BSN, RN]

Not really flirting, but caught me off guard and humorous. I was working as an EKG tech at a hospital. I had finished performing a 12 led EKG on an elderly lady. As I was removing the electrode patches (big round patches with a metal snap in the middle) the patient asks me to leave two of them on her chest. I ask her why. She stated "I had a double mastectomy when I was 26. I haven't had nipples in 60 yrs."

[HeySis, BSN, RN]

When inserting a foley catheter on a male patient, I have had several say "Do you want me to hold that monster (or some other reference to what they think is the greatness of their size) for you?"

But once I had this little old guy and while I was prepping my sterile field he said "Nurse, if you have a magnifying glass and tweezers, I'll find it for you."

As far as other staff goes, we had one male nurse that went the rounds hitting on the female nurses, trying to give them shoulder massages and such, I told him it made me uncomfortable several times (as I would not allow him to do that). The last time I told him if he tried to touch me again I would take him out. And I said it in a stance and seriousness of tone that made a man twice my size take a step back and never touch me (or really talk to me) again. :)

[Davey Do]

As I was removing the electrode patches (big round patches with a metal snap in the middle) the patient asks me to leave two of them on her chest. I ask her why. She stated "I had a double mastectomy when I was 26. I haven't had nipples in 60 yrs."

Yeah...

[martymoose, BSN, RN]

But once I had this little old guy and while I was prepping my sterile field he said "Nurse, if you have a magnifying glass and tweezers, I'll find it for you."

omg how did you keep a straight face?

[NurseGirl525, ASN, RN]

I can't get past he was middle-aged about 35ish. Sitting here shaking my head.

[NursesRmofun, ASN, RN]

Kind of a sore subject because I hate this kind of thing. It is so disrespectful.

I once had a co-worker who flirted with me in a not mild but moderate sort of way, mostly just smiles and eye contact sort of thing...never taking it too far until one day he decided to make it physical, making obviously lewd innuendo and brushing a body part with his arm. I was so disappointed and hurt. We didn't speak for days and then tried to go back to normal, but he tried to punish me by not helping with lift, pull patients and other duties as he had previously. And it was his job to help me. Sigh.

P.S. I reported it to my manager who made excuses and did nothing. I know, I know....live and learn.

[SnowShoeRN]

Kind of a sore subject because I hate this kind of thing. It is so disrespectful.

I once had a co-worker who flirted with me in a not mild but moderate sort of way, mostly just smiles and eye contact sort of thing...never taking it too far until one day he decided to make it physical, making obviously lewd innuendo and brushing a body part with his arm. I was so disappointed and hurt. We didn't speak for days and then tried to go back to normal, but he tried to punish me by not helping with lift, pull patients and other duties as he had previously. And it was his job to help me. Sigh.

P.S. I reported it to my manager who made excuses and did nothing. I know, I know....live and learn.

That's really crappy, obviously detrimental to patient care, and pretty much textbook sexual harassment. Did this happen recently? I think I would have reported him to HR and let everyone know what happened. I'm sorry this happened to you.

[AutumnApple]

Kind of a sore subject because I hate this kind of thing. It is so disrespectful.

I once had a co-worker who flirted with me in a not mild but moderate sort of way, mostly just smiles and eye contact sort of thing...never taking it too far until one day he decided to make it physical, making obviously lewd innuendo and brushing a body part with his arm. I was so disappointed and hurt. We didn't speak for days and then tried to go back to normal, but he tried to punish me by not helping with lift, pull patients and other duties as he had previously. And it was his job to help me. Sigh.

P.S. I reported it to my manager who made excuses and did nothing. I know, I know....live and learn.

Would you believe, at the LTC facility I worked at, we had a UAP who did something similar? It was money, not flirting he was after.

When I got there he was already full blown into his manipulating. People kept telling me "He's a good aid most of the time, he's just had problems lately. He's even won awards here, but for the last year or two something is wrong............"

When he was new, according to them, he was a real go getter. Did his work, helped when he could and eager to learn. He even discussed going to LPN school with the nurses a lot (something he never did, which, I believed to be a part of the problem).

Well, over time, a small handful of nurses started buying him lunches. It was no big deal. The nurse would be going to McD's for themselves and get a little extra for him.

And I'm sure you've already guessed what happened next. Slowly but surely, so slowly no one really noticed..............it became the expectation. It got to the point where, if no one brought him in lunch he would ask for money to get it for himself. And there was just this air about it all that seemed to say: If he didn't get his free lunch, he had been wronged.

So, some nurses just denied the whole song and dance and didn't get him anything or give him money. Others went along with it. And, in the end, he changed how he approached his job. He, to no ones surprise, favored the ones who favored him.

This behavior was one of thousands of things I had to deal with in that facility. My impression was, if I didn't approach it right, it'd be an never ending story. So I knew I had to tread carefully, and I think my interventions worked.

I did make him aware of the fact that patient perceptions of him tended to be polarized. This was true, not fabricated. Patients under the care of nurses who bought him lunches of course got better treatment and had better things to say about him. I asked him if he knew what the cause of the polarized reviews of him was: "It seems patients either love or hate you. Why is that you think? Is there anything specific about the ones you don't get along with that we can address?"

I didn't end there though: "What troubles me too is, sometimes individual patients bounce back and forth about what they think of you. One day they love you, next day they hate you. This tells me the problem isn't the patient. Something else is changing their viewpoint." And I didn't accept having bad days as the cause of it.

Basically, I let him know I was aware of what was going on. And I made sure he saw me checking with patients concerning his conduct on a weekly basis. The days I did talk to patients about their care, I ONLY talked to patients I knew were with a nurse who did not give him money or lunches.

That wasn't going to stop it though. Lets face it, much of this is subjective so, hard to be punitive about it.

As harsh as it sounds, I came down much harder on the nurses who bought his favoritism and supported his behavior. I understood it started with the intention of being nice, but he had been blatantly favoring some nurses over others for a long time since then.

Part of being a nurse, a professional, is that we oversee and supervise UAP. These nurses, from my point of view (the ones who bought his favoritism) were not practicing leadership. They were promoting favoritism that in the end, affected patients.

There were no firings or write ups but, I made it clear that a major part of their next annual review was going to include an entry on whether they improved their overall leadership qualities or not. Two of them ended up wanting more specifics, and we ended up having a workshop with them on it. Things such as: If you see a fellow nurse drowning, don't let the aid hide in your room and refuse to help that nurse. In short, we promoted not leaving fellow nurses out on an island while UAP favor you for reasons that are not company policy based.

I don't know how this helps you other than to say: If he was not helping, the nursing force as a whole should have been addressing him. You shouldn't be left out on an island dealing with it alone.

[Farawyn]

I can't get past he was middle-aged about 35ish. Sitting here shaking my head.

Yea, this is the thing that jumped out at me. Guess I'm the Crypt Keeper.