Before this week, I really had never given much thought to this topic. I’ve read articles about it, I’m aware of the laws (it’s a felony to assault a healthcare worker), but this has never been a big issue in my nursing practice. I work in a cardiovascular ICU, which means that most of our patients are post-surgical. When patients are taking swings at you, it’s usually because they’re coming out of anesthesia and, as frustrated as we are as nurses, we deal with it and let it roll off our backs.
But, when you take care of a patient that is free of any anesthetics in his/her system, and they are not going through problems related to a medical condition (stroke, DTs, etc), there is no excuse for abusive behavior. These behaviors can range anywhere from ordering you around like a servant: “This water isn’t cold enough; get me a new cup now!”, to calling you a *insert swear words here*, to grabbing onto your hair and not letting go. To be honest with you, I’m not sure which one of these scenarios bugs me the most. They all irk me, but in different ways. They are all so similar because they all cause me to lose instant respect for the patient. I walk into my shift every morning with full expectations that I’m going to have a good day. Even when I get report from the nurse who’s going off shift and he/she tells me “Oh, bed 36 is such a pain in the butt”, I still walk into room 36 with a smile on my face and a clean slate hoping for the best.
But when the patient does something disrespectful, all bets are off. I am still a high caliber nurse even when pushed to the brink. My patients are always well taken care for, all of their basic needs are met, but it makes it harder to WANT to go into the room and check on the patient. It makes it hard to WANT to get them a fresh cup of ice chips because you see the current cup is half melted or WANT to give them a lotion backrub because you know they’ve had to lay in bed for 6 hours straight after a procedure.
I do WANT to be a caring, thoughful, hard-working nurse. Why are you making this so hard for me to do?
