Never piss me off

[SeaCat]

We have a couple of new R.N.'s on my unit. They are both young and full of themselves. They both have just graduated from Nursing School and both have the attitude that Aides are the scum of the Earth.

Last week they worked with me and pissed me off. This weekend they again worked with me but I was ready for them.

Today I was the only Aide on the floor. They were teamed up with a couple of R.N.'s who are friends of mine and are also of like minds with me, they don't like pettiness. These R.N.'s and I talked it over and decided to give them a run for their money.

Calls started to come in. Little things like patients being in need of being cleaned up because they were covered in filth. The new R.N.'s were sent to these rooms while being told I was busy. Before long they were up to their elbows in Feces and Urine. They weren't coping well with this. They were starting to turn a faint shade of green. This wasn't what they were expecting from the Nursing Field.

Then came the fun. One of the old hands and I went into a room to do a dressing change on a patient with some truly nasty wounds. These wounds are both large and deep. The have to be packed. We set the patient up after he was medicated then called in these new R.N.'s to "assist" us.

The new R.N.'s stabalized the patients leg as we uncovered then removed the packing. They were realy turning funny colors now as they watched us pull out yards of packing. When we started replacing the packing they turned a nice color of gray and passed out. We let them lay on the floor as we finished the job. When we were done we revived the dynamic duo using smelling salts then asked them to clean up the old dressings as we had been called to another room.

Somehow I don't think either one of them will return to the unit.

Cat

 

[TE999]

Weren't these ninety-day wonders exposed to this sort of thing in nursing school?

 

[john-the-author]

I have to agree with TE999: nursing just ain't book learning (or it sure shouldn't be). Patients can be reeeeeeally icky. And yes, patient cleanup and packing wounds are both some of the more special parts of the ickiness.

 

[3113]

So much for solving the U.S. nursing shortage After that, they're probably both going to quit nursing and tell a lot of young women thinking of going into it that horror story, motivating those young women (and men) to not go into it either.

 

[john-the-author]

Are Irish nurses still coming over here in droves? They had been some years ago because the pay scales for nurses were so much better in the States than Ireland.