Page 77 of Dr. Fellow

“It’s all good, M,” I lie, grabbing my stethoscope and a blank piece of paper from the desk. “A few hours on the floor isn’t going to kill me.”

Fortunately, our charge nurse wasn’t lying and the patients I took over really aren’t bad—one is pending discharge, and the other three are stable, or waiting to transfer to another floor. Unfortunately, right after I finished taking report from Kat, I had to help Cass and another coworker run an unsuccessful code in bay two for thirty minutes.

As I’m leaving the bay, I notice one of my patient’s family members standing outside of their door. She’s staring at me with a snarky expression while she taps her Dr. Scholls-covered foot on the tile floor impatiently.

“Nurse,” she calls as I’m washing the death off my hands. “Nurse, I’ve been calling for fifteen minutes because I need ice for my water.”

I take a breath, searching for patience that doesn’t come. Because in what world is ice more important than saving someone’s life?

Walking over to the Karen, I calmly state, “My name is Morgan. I told you that earlier when I introduced myself and wrote my information on the whiteboard. I’m a nurse, but I am also a human being with a name.”

Normally I would just take her callout with a smile on my face, but she caught me less than five minutes after listening to a mother’s gut-wrenching sobs as the doctor pronounced time of death on her teenage son. And yes, I recognize that this woman has no idea what I just witnessed. She’s probably just stressed and taking it out on me. But I simply cannot find empathy for her right now—my cup is empty.

She scrunches up her overly made-up face like she’s about to bite back.

“I was in another patient’s room,” I state calmly, interrupting her before she says something that will really set me off. “Give me a moment, and I’ll go get your ice. Do you need anything else?”

She says no and turns to go back inside the room. Under her breath, she mutters, “Lazy-ass nurses don’t want to work anymore.”

My teeth grind against each other, biting back the words that I really want to say as I walk to get her precious bag of ice.

People want to know why nurses are leaving the bedside and causing a healthcare staffing crisis? This is a prime example.

We witness traumatic events on a daily basis that most of the general population can never begin to understand. And that’s okay, because it’s what we signed up for. We signed up to advocate for our patients, to treat them with dignity, and to safely care for them like they’re our own family members.

What we didn’t sign up for is the verbal abuse, the degradation, the dehumanization of our feelings that also occurs. We didn’t sign up to be chastised if we take a moment for ourselves after simply doing our jobs. We didn’t sign up for a lot of it, but we try our hardest to rise above it.

One of the core tenets of nursing is compassion, but over time it becomes increasingly challenging to have compassion for people who do not also have compassion for us. And when you couple these daily experiences with other ongoing frustrations like unsafe staffing ratios, increases in expectations without increases in pay, and lack of support or recognition from administration, I don’t blame anyone for leaving. There are some days when I feel like I have my foot out the door too.

On my way back with the ice, the call bell starts going off in another one of the rooms that I’m covering. I hope that Kat isn’t expecting me to chart for her because I haven’t had a second to breathe, let alone log into the computer and update anything.

“How can I help you?” I ask, popping my head into the room of her patient scheduled for discharge.

Our ER is set up like a square, with all of the patient rooms and trauma bays located on the perimeter. There’s a massive circular desk sitting smack dab in the middle of the room which allows us to help each other when call lights go off. For some reason, however, we have a single patient room that’s tucked around the corner, away from the sight of everyone else. Because of its quiet location on the hallway of physician offices, we typically put patients in there who are actively dying. Sometimes, though, night shift admits people to the room when they run out of space, which clearly was the case with this patient overnight.

“I need to get the fuck out of here,” the patient states, pacing barefoot back and forth. “Get me out of here.”

On instinct, I turn off the call light so the beeping stops. “Social work is trying to get you set up with an outpatient facility. Shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

This particular patient is a twenty-seven-year-old male who came in early this morning for an STD test. While they ran that lab, they also took a standard drug panel and found that he was positive for meth. And the closer I get to him, it doesn’t surprise me—he’s tall, but I doubt he weighs more than a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet.

Apparently, the night shift nurse found him trying to give himself a bath with hand sanitizer and had to administer a sedative because he was tweaking from being awake too long. I didn’t have a chance to peek my head into the room before I got pulled into the code, but when I got report, I was told that he was finally calm after sleeping for a few hours.

Calm my ass.

This man is irritable as hell. His blue eyes briefly meet mine, moving faster than normal as they shoot around the room.

“Can I give you something to help you relax while we wait on orders?” I suggest, keeping my tone soothing as I walk over to the computer on the wall. Even though I haven’t had a chance to look at the medication record, I’m sure there’s an order available for comfort while we wait on the transfer details.

“Fuck no. Get me the fuck out of here,” he says, voice rising substantially. “What are you even doing?”

“I’m Morgan, your nurse,” I remind him gently as I log into his chart. “You called me because you wanted to be discharged.”

He begins to pace again before getting in my face and screaming, “So discharge me, bitch!”

I swallow down my sadness. He’s too young to have this life, and if he leaves without getting into a treatment center, I’m worried he’ll end up dead.

“Let me check with social work again,” I offer, hoping to give him some reassurance. “If they aren’t ready, you can always go against medical advice, but I’d really like for you to stay.”

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