I made one of those mistakes that your mom always warns you against… judging a book by it’s cover. Being a nurse, it’s so easy to generalize having seen all the sights that we’ve seen. You get report on your patient who’s a smoker and threatening to leave the ER to get a cigarette (but is still being admitted as an inpatient) and you assume it’s going to be a long, argument-filled day of why she cannot just simply “step outside for a smoke”. Or, you hear in report that your patient’s tox screen was positive for cocaine and he just had a heart attack…at 30 years old. It’s sometimes very hard to have compassion for those people who have brought their medical problems on themselves while in the next bed, a sweet 72 year old is hanging on to her life without doing a single thing to harm her body (and generally the non-drug user is a lot kinder to the staff and easier to get along with for 12 hours straight).

I was at work recently, and my morning started off with one patient who had surgery the day prior and my other room was the open bed (meaning that I was the nurse open to take the emergent patient from the emergency room or the patient who was coding on the other floor). My surgical patient wasn’t doing too well- her morning xray showed that her left lung was whited out (which in her case meant that she had blood around that lung) and she needed a chest tube placed to drain the blood. So, the surgeon came in, and it took him several attempts to get the tube in because the patient had a lot of scar tissue around her lung due to a previous lung surgery and about half of a liter of blood ended up on the bed. At the same time as we were cleaning up the mess, the charge nurse came in to let me know that I was getting a patient who came in from the emergency room and I needed to call and get report. So, that was already a bad start to hearing about the patient- I was about 2 hours behind in caring for my first patient and now I had another one to admit.

So, I call down and get report from the nurse, who starts by telling me that this patient is HIV+, has hepatitis, herpes, is a current smoker, and they just had to sedate because he was screaming and rolling all over the bed. Awesome. If this doesn’t sound like a winning assignment, I don’t know what does. *sarcasm*

The patient gets to the unit, is indeed restless and complaining of a lot of pain (and in my head I’m wondering if he’s a drug user too because of the other history I had heard). So, I give him morphine and he actually sleeps for a few hours. This is the definition of nursing bliss. :)

After he wakes up, I had all of his HIV medication (that we had to have couriers pick up from other hospitals in the valley because they are so hard to come by and expensive). I got him a sandwich from the kitchen and we started talking – he was very calm and relaxed now. He told me about his past – he was a professional figure skater and lost his partner about a year ago to heart failure and has been having a rough time ever since. He had a dog at home that he was worried about because he didn’t have anyone to go feed the dog while he was in the hospital (our direct of social services ended up taking the patient’s keys and going to get his dog, with his permission of course). We talked for almost an hour and he was one of the sweetest people I had come across in awhile.

I wish that I could curb my judgments about people more easily. I was dreading my day in the morning and as I left work that evening, I had a smile on my face. It was a good day.