Left Alone to Lick My Wounds

A particularly caustic nurse once told me that in her 20+ years of practice, she has learned the true role of the nurse is to take abuse while maintaining a smile for 12 hours. At the time I thought that she needed to retire and do so within the hour but after last week’s emotionally grueling shifts, I don’t think she was that far off from the truth. Every racist epithet was thrown at me, every combination of insults regarding my appearance, my intelligence, my competence and my worth as a human being were shouted from the triumvirate of asshole families in exam rooms 5, 6 and 7. Why would that be? Because they could not understand why they were ‘forced’ to wait so long to see the doctor when their elderly relatives were in various stages of ‘dying’. Calling in security seemed to incense them further since one of the family members was supposedly someone ‘important’. They only seemed to settle down once the doctor saw them and of course by then they were all as happy as pigs in shit. By the end of that shift, I was seething in raw white hot inarticulate rage because I was forced to endure those families’ abuse. And for what? I did everything within my scope of practice, I spent an exhausting amount of time with all of those entitled bastards about what the emergency department process entails for the patient, the role of the nurse and the physician in a patient’s care but it was all in vain. The charge nurse and I walked into their rooms to have them berate us in the most demeaning ways possible because they could not disimpact their heads from their asses to open their eyes to the reality that in an overwhelmed system, we were trying to provide the best care possible. Fuck trying to empathize with patients when they treat nurses like shit all because they feel that it’s their right to get whatever the fuck they want whenever they want.

As I write this, I’m still furious. Why is it that nurses have to put up with so much shit? Had I been working ANYWHERE ELSE, all three of those families would have been dragged out by the police but because they were ‘important’ and ‘sick’, I had to put up with those repulsive degenerates. Why is it that I would have been forced to attend some bullshit anger management class if I told them to go fuck themselves sideways with an IV pole right after I heard the supposedly dying patient call me a “dumb rag head bitch” because the blood pressure cuff was too tight? Why is it that my only outlet is to document thoroughly and write a lengthy email to my manager who’s just going to hold some idiotic meeting rehashing the same old policies about handling volatile patients? How the hell would my manager would understand exactly how viscerally humiliating racist slurs can be especially when she could never have experienced it herself? I don’t feel like the ‘better person’ for following the prescribed course of action. I feel completely powerless and incredibly angry because they got away scotch free while I’m left with no meaningful course of action. Now I get why nursing has such a huge problem with retention and it has nothing to do with changing a dirty diaper.