Names changed to protect the innocent. Me. I’m the innocent one here.
I don’t usually talk about when I was a nurse on this site for a few reasons. I don’t really feel like I have any good stories. Sure, I have the sort of juicy stories to tell at parties all nurses do, but nothing that has enough meat or meaning to be worth writing out. And of course, even if I did, there’s HIPAA. Sure, these stories are all years ago and could be told without locations or names but there’s still some part of me that will be forever paranoid that someone would sleuth it all out. I also feel like a lot of people want nurse stories to paint nurses as either heroes or villains, the pure saint giving of herself so the sick children might live or the high school mean girl who only became a nurse to continue to be mean to the defenseless. And I don’t have any stories like that because – surprise – nurses aren’t villains and they aren’t angels among us, they’re just people.
I mean, this is about a bitch, but I’m not saying all nurses are bitches. If they were, then Lynette wouldn’t have stood out so much.
I worked nightshift in a step-down because I liked the quiet. To be clear: the patients were not the ‘quiet’ part. Dayshift nurses who have never worked a nightshift all secretly believe that nightshift has it easier than they do because the patients all go to sleep promptly after the 2100 med pass and only wake up in time for the 0600 vitals. This is bullshit. Nobody sleeps in a hospital, especially on a unit inches away from the ICU. We have to wake them up for vitals and usually more meds around midnight. Sometimes we’re in and out hanging antibiotics every other hour. Most of my patients were on “as-needed” pain meds, and they needed them as soon as they were allowed to have them, whether that was eight pm or three in the morning. And then there’s just the general sleeplessness and anxiety of being sick enough to be in the hospital. Nobody sleeps.
Nightshift is quieter because everybody else in the hospital was gone. Doctors. Physical therapy. Occupational therapy. Nurse navigators. Management. Most family members. They’d dim the hallway lights around eight o’clock and then for the most part the hospital was humming on neutral, just the occasional IV alarm and the sounds of The Golden Girls and The First 48 reruns wafting out of patients rooms. Then the hallway lights would get turned on again around six in the morning and you’d know it was time to make sure you’d done everything possible for your patient and to get ready for the most stressful part of the day: report.
God, I hated report. Especially toward the end of my time, when they started insisting on bedside report. I get that they wanted patients to be more informed, but Jesus Christ, most of our patients were confused, and the ones who weren’t were usually at least trying to sleep and didn’t want to hear all about how much their body currently hated them at 7:03 in the morning.
As with every job, there were dayshift nurses I loved giving report to, and the ones I hated.
Jennifer would start doing her morning vitals and assessment with each patient as you were giving report, something she was supposed to do later, when report was done, when you the nightshift nurse were happily in your car going the fuck home. Actually, after about a year of working with Jennifer on opposite shifts she transferred to nightshift. When her move was announced one of the dayshift nurses smirkingly asked me, are you excited for Jennifer to join you on nights?
And I answered honestly, actually, yeah, I really like Jennifer except for giving her report. Which I guess you guys will get to do now.
The dayshift nurse had not considered this. Her smirk was gone.
There was Agnes, who was your classic, and what about this surgery they had in 2007? Like, I don’t know fucking know, Agnes, that was a hernia repair and they’re currently here for heart failure so it didn’t feel relevant, do you want to know when their next sotalol is due or not?
Oh, and Maria, who showed up to her shift directly at seven and wouldn’t take report from you until she had looked her patients up. For everyone who isn’t a nurse: it was expected that you would show up fifteen to twenty minutes prior to the shift change so you could look up your patient before getting report from the exhausted nurse who only wants to wash off the hospital and go to sleep. Eventually we all just started giving her report anyway as she furiously tried to ignore us in favor of looking through the patients’ chart.
And then there was Lynette.
Lynette was just mean. That’s kind of the long and short of it. Well, she was mean, and she thought she was the best nurse on the planet. Giving her report was basically her searching through your entire twelve hour shift to find something she could complain about.
You gave this antibiotic half an hour late, now my whole day is going to be thrown off.
Why wasn’t a second IV started on this patient? What do you mean ‘their veins are all blown and the IV team couldn’t get them either?’ Great, now I’m going to have to deal with it.
These fluids should be running at 100 mL an hour, not 75! Everything is ruined.
Stuff like that. Every. Single. Time. Little stuff. Stuff we all notice the previous nurse might have done but have the good graces to realize it wasn’t actually an emergency and just fix it after they left. But no. Not with Lynette. Lynette was going to point out every single mistake, every single time, until you walked off the unit to your car with tears in your eyes.
At least I did. I’m not a very confrontational person, it’s part of the reason I stopped being a floor nurse. Medicine really brings in people who think its perfectly okay to berate co-workers in public. I once got screamed at over the phone for five full minutes by a doctor who then demanded to speak to my charge and tried to have me written up, all because I, a nurse on the liver unit, couldn’t tell him the names of the cardiac units in literally one of the biggest hospitals in the United States, when it didn’t matter because all I had to write in the order was ‘transfer to cardiac unit’ and our unit secretary would have figured it out.
It’s probably misogyny, yet again, that nurses can get the ‘high school mean girls’ label when most of the nurses I worked with were kind and supportive while at the same time most of the doctors I worked with were raging assholes and they get all the excuses for their behavior.
All that said I still hated Lynette. I feared her. I wished every day that she would just quit or transfer out, and every morning I would hold my breath looking at the dayshift schedule to see if I had to talk to her.
One time I got her good. I took a patient from her knowing full well she was back the next day. I get a call from the patient’s doctor two hours into the shift telling me he wants to do a bedside procedure the next morning and needs a bunch of stuff ready. Knowing this was exactly the sort of thing that would make all of the snakes growing on Lynette’s head in lieu of hair stand straight up, I went to fucking work. As soon as the orders were in I called the pharmacy to get all of the medications the doctors would need. I figured out exactly what syringes and such were required and I got it all together and put it in a med bag and put the med bag in the patient’s bin in the medication cabinet.
Of course, as soon as I told Lynette about the doctor wanting to do the procedure bedside her eyes fell out of her skull and her snakes all passed out. She put her eyes back in and dear lord the venom. Her snakes were ready to strike. She was going to kill me for the sin of having a patient who needed care from the both of us. Shame. SHAME.
Until I showed her in the med cabinet where all the supplies were neatly waiting for her and told her all she had to do was fetch the bag when the doctor showed up. She of course examined every vial, the syringes, everything, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Which I fucking hadn’t.
The pinched look on her face made me giggle the entire way home.
It didn’t fix anything between us. She was a still a bitch and I was still afraid of her. One morning I found out I had to give her report on a single patient and I immediately showed my charge nurse my FitBit. My heartrate had jumped up to 115 bpm. For a while I refused to give her report, but then so many of us refused that all of that went out the window and we were back in the mix.
The hospital would never fire her because besides all this, she was a good nurse.
Or was she?
I said that to one of the other nightshift nurses once. She’s a monster, but at least she’s a good nurse. As far as I could tell none of that venom and ire was ever pointed at her patients.
But this nightshift nurse looked at me with so much incredulity, and then said something that still sticks with me.
She’s not a good nurse. Being a good nurse means having a good relationship with your co-workers, it means being able to communicate without having a tone in your voice all the time. If we’re all afraid of giving her report, then she’s not getting a good report. She’s not a good nurse.
I never thought of it that way, and now I can’t stop thinking of anything that way. We make such hay in movies and television of the professional who is so intelligent, so skilled in his field, that everyone just sort of has to ignore the fact that he also has a shit personality. Like Gregory House or Tony Stark. And that makes for good drama, but I don’t think it works in reality. I think my friend was right. If you can’t talk to other people, especially other people in your field, with decency and respect, then I don’t think you’re actually good at that thing.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 