The Adventures of Nurse Niki
It’s Not All Cute Print Scrubs and Bunny Blankets is this week’s episode of The Adventures of Nurse Niki. Niki ruminates about floating from PICU to pediatrics. If you’re new to the blog you may want to catch up by starting here, Chapter 1
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Nurse mugs now available at the JParadisiRN Art Store.
The JParadisiRN Art Store is NEW, offering three paintings of nurses, including a brand new painting of a man-nurse, “Don’t Call Me Murse.” Two of my most requested paintings, “Sometimes My Surgical Mask Feels Like a Gag,” and “The White That Binds (Pinning Ceremony)” are also available. You can choose a mug from seven different styles, and customize them with the options offered.
I will offer new items soon. Be sure to take a look.
There’s also a permanent link to the JParadisiRNArtStore on this blog’s right-hand column.
artist unknown. photo: jparadisi 2K11
Someone placed a sticker on our unit’s grease board. It reads, “You can change the world if you want to.”
Really? I think about how hard it is simply to keep peace among nurses during the course of a shift.
Throughout history, people have tried changing the world. Some accomplished extraordinary transformations through the persistent presentation of their ideas. Many suffered disastrous personal consequences for their efforts.”All we are saying, is give peace a chance” angers the hell out of some people. The list of eloquent, intelligent people who paid with their lives to enlighten the world is daunting, but peace is not promoted through silence.
A while ago, I noticed a patient reading Ken Kesey. The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey was raised in Eugene, Oregon. He created the fictional character Nurse Ratched. The irony isn’t lost on me.
The poet John Donne wrote “I am a little world made cunningly of elements.” I wonder if the sticker on our unit’s grease board means by changing ourselves and our interactions with others, we become part of a world-changing collective; a sort of code team for the world? That feels a little more manageable. It beats waiting for the other guy to change, huh?
Use the Call Light for Help photo: JParadisi 2010
Blogger Theresa Brown, RN’s post for the NY Times, Violence on the Oncology Ward struck a chord within me. My own experiences with violence directed at nurses started while I was a nursing student during a clinical rotation over 20 years ago. Standing in the courtyard of a large urban hospital under a bright noonday sun, someone grabbed me from behind by the hair while screaming obscenities in my ear. My head was jerked backwards against my shoulder so violently that the only thing I could see was a classmate and a passerby running towards me to fend off the attacker. After the two rescuers pried the fingers that were beyond my grasp loose from my hair, I saw that the attacker was a diminutive woman dressed in filthy rags. I stood stunned as she walked down the sun-drenched sidewalk, still shouting obscenities. When I reported the incident to my clinical instructor, expecting her to warn the rest of our class to be careful, she told me disinterestedly that “It was just a crazy person, it doesn’t count.” I realized that both the “crazy woman” and myself had been dismissed.
Years later, in another hospital, a patient came to his appointment with a butcher knife in his back pocket. That hospital has a no tolerance policy for weapons of any kind, and security was quick to take the knife surrendered voluntarily by the patient so he could receive care. After security left, the patient looked coolly into my eyes and said “I don’t know why you’re worried about the knife, I could beat you to death with my crutch if I wanted to.” The security officer returned, and the patient was escorted off campus.
He took himself to the emergency department, and told his story to a nurse there. This nurse called my department. Listening to the story, he commented “That’s bizarre,” after every statement I made. I finally asked him “What’s bizarre?” and he said, “That you feel he threatened you, after security took the knife.” No longer a student nurse, I asserted myself: “He did threaten me.” The ER nurse said, “I find it bizarre. That kind of thing happens all the time over here.”
“What’s bizarre,” I told him, “is that you accept it happens.”
Studies of workplace violence suggest that accepting inappropriate behavior in the health care environment creates a setting conducive to more serious forms of violence. Verbal or physical threats, and carrying any weapon or item that can be used to cause death or serious physical injury are only two examples of inappropriate behavior.
I wonder if a sense of duty to the patient blurs what is acceptable behavior for some nurses? Despite his threatening behavior, I arranged another method of care for my patient with the knife, because he needed treatment.
I don’t know if enacting legislation mandating tougher penalties for workplace violence committed against nurses is the answer. It seems to me that everyone needs protection from violence. What I do know is that violence towards nurses is still accepted by many in the profession as an inevitable part of our job description, and I strongly disagree.
