If you are a 30ish, solidly middle-class, slightly yuppie mom, and you bring your cute-as-a-button four-year-old into the emergency room at ten o'clock at night on an evening where pediatrics is completely SLAMMED with sick kids (including one whose VP shunt is clogged and who is lethargic and vomiting, and a sickler with severe pain, and several whooping babies), you are not allowed to complain about the wait.
Especially when the complaint is "stomach pains" and your kid is running around the waiting room, terrorizing everyone.
ESPECIALLY when you and your stomach pain kid are sitting in my little triage cubicle and the kid is SHOVELING strawberry-filled sandwich cookies (but they're ORGANIC so they're GOOD FOR YOU) into his freaking little pie hole as fast as he can chew. Seriously, crumbs everywhere. And when I ask him, "Honey, can you point to where it hurts?" the kid shakes his head and keeps shoveling. "So, Mom, any vomiting or diarrhea? Fever? No? Nothing? Eating normally?" (obviously...)
You are especially not allowed to say to your kid, while waiting in the ER, when he is whining to you about how he wants to go home, that HE (again, four years old) should come over to ME and tell ME HOW SICK HE IS FEELING. Do you really think I can't hear you? And it's not acceptable to come back to my door every time I open it to see another patient and ask again and again how much longer until you're seen. And please don't try to be assertive or whatever by saying, "I really want him to be seen soon. I'm sure you can make that happen."
Lady, we all want things. Right now I want a bag full of hundred-dollar bills and some heroin but THAT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN EITHER.
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5 comments:
I understand that this situation could be annoying, but I am wondering why you chose a profession that requires three things to be good at it: compassion, patience, and empathy. If you are new to the field of nursing, well God bless you, I can't imagine a more difficult lot in life than a job that is so frustrating and annoying it shows in your writing. :-( Good luck to you.
Billybob--
Have you read any of my other posts (or any other ER blog for that matter)? Most of this is venting.
Believe it or not, I am a very compassionate, patient, and empathic person. But If you truly read my post about this occasion, what I was expressing was my frustration with a woman who not only brought her young son with a non-emergent condition (one that should have been brought to his pediatrician during the day, not to a crowded emergency room at ten-thirty at night)but also encouraged him to lie to the nurse (by asking him to tell me "how sick he was" when in fact he wasn't sick at all and just wanted to go home and go to bed) in order to be seen faster. My frustration was with a woman who apparently felt so entitled that she constantly asked to be brought back to the ER when I made it perfectly clear (in a compassionate, empathetic way) that, while I understood that she felt her son was ill, that there were children whose conditions were more emergent than that of her son's.
Also my way was funnier. So there!
um, GuitarGirl, BillyBob has turned into a bit of an anti-medblog troll of late.
Ignore him.
yeah, I thought I recognized that diseased liver from someplace.
It must be shocking for people like BB to see that we aren't just smily happy cup-of-ice and warm blanket fetchers all the time.
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