Saturday, June 21, 2008

268th reason my job can be annoying...

Another annoying thing about nursing... Picture this: Busy Friday night on a hot, sweltering June night in Santa Monica. I actually told someone that the only people coming into the ER are the very sick or the very stupid. Boy, was I right. In one room I have a elderly woman with severe dementia who had her leg ripped open while seated in some sort of chair that is supposed to keep her stayed put. In the next room, a girl who (we piece together) is telling her friends and family that she has a brain tumor. We do all sorts of tests and find out there is absolutely nothing wrong with her. A CAT scan of her head shows a perfectly normal 23 year old brain. Kinda what we thought in the first place. She specifically asked us not to reveal her test results to her friends. This STUPID girl is faking an illness while the woman in the next room needs our full attention. I'm more than pissed. I just wasted time on a silly game while I could have been assisting the actual sick person right next door.

I'm driven nuts by the "trolls", "malingerers", and hypochondriacs that waste all the staff's time when we could be focused on the actual sick people. Wonder why medical care and insurance is expensive? Blame these assholes...

2 comments:

guy said...

Hey there - I get a kick out of this. My wife is a doc and I am a chef - so you can picture us just like you but worse. Realize that other people like you exist! People do not understand the part of my wife being married to a chef - but then when they realize her schedule they wonder - we just had to dear friends trick us into house sitting in Aruba for them just to get us together so we could re-connect! IT is a fun life for us - take care love the post! My wife was a nurse before med school! So I will share her site with you - Guy - a chef in Atlanta!

Leah Perlingieri said...

would it have been out of line to recommend a shrink for this young woman? i knew someone who faked cancer for a while...i felt totally betrayed to say the least b/c i was so upset when he told me...people are weird.