Being Part Of the 'In' Crowd

As mentioned previously, I have never been in hospital before.  Little did I know that they are such a hive of activity. They take monitoring and evaluation to a whole new level. Urine, blood pressure, taking bloods, pills, anti clotting injections (that bloody hurt and often drew blood I'll have ya know), pills, catheter and monitoring of it. Then it's onto the cast that make up 'the hospital'.

Consultants are obviously the leaders of the pack and they only grace you with their presence once every few days.  Mine thought he was cool and basically had a humour bypass but hey he's a decent surgeon so won't hold that against him.

Otherwise you're in the hands of the gaggle of junior docs. I have to admit that the main junior doc assigned to  me was a bit of a cow and managed to freak me out no end at times when I just didn't need that. It was her first week at the hospital and so she was eager to follow the consultants words to the latter.  But freaking me out when it came time to remove my catheter for the 1st and then 2nd time was no help at all.  By saying that if  bladder didn't wake up soon I'd have problems for the rest of the life for some reason was not inspiring. It made me bloody scared and only seeing a bad bleak future for myself.  I do think that in terms of people these junior docs have a lot to learn- empathy is one of those things that goes cap in hand with experience and  maturity.  It was painfully clear that many of these junior docs were fresh out of school and had no idea about people or how to understand and communicate with them.

As for nurses there were good and bad ones.  And some that were a combination of the two much like Jekyll and Hyde. There was one who was my main nurse when I arrived - she tried to take out a line from my hand when it couldn't actually be done so she was tugging hard at my hand just to make sure and yes I did almost cry.  She was a bit of what I'd call a brown noser - licking doctors arses and smiling at the sister but at times she was an outright bitch.

I was moved to another part of the ward for my last few days and the nurse there was loads nicer.  She treated all of her patients differently and took time to get to know us. She had been an inpatient herself at the hospital for a similar op so had empathy and maturity.

Then there was the I work way too hard nurse.  She did something crazy like 3 or 4 nts back to back so stress, ridiculous workload and sleep deprivation  meant that she was horrible to patients.  There was no empathy, pure bossiness and general rattiness.  At one point my anti clotting injection that she had tended to give me a in my arm (tho it made my arm bleed) - well the next night she was going to give it into my belly. I told her to take her hike as one of the symptoms from my op was constipation and I hadn't been for days and had a really swollen, tender belly.  I told her no categorically. I won - it was in my arm. Yay.

And as for the patients, where do I begin ..........