The Demon Nurse

Ah so I’m finally carrying on the hospital series of stories.

You soon find, that in hospital, your day counts on the nurses who are on shift. Who they are depends on what they’ll be. A bad mood means waiting hours for painkillers. A bad person means having morphine effectively waved in front of you in a sick donkey and carrot scenario. My aptly named “Demon Nurse”, was a bad person.

She came on shift on the day after my operation. I was in a lot of pain and Dr Plastic had been down to see me on ward round. He chased up a nurse and put morphine on my medication chart. The other doctors who came to see me sang the praises of a regular medication system – up until this point my dosing up had been sporadic due to A2 being a busy ward and, I suppose, me not marching up to the nurses station to interrupt tea break screaming like a banshee. Silly me.

Anyway, I buzzed for the nurse after a naive hour waiting for my morphine. DN turned up.

“Dr Plastic said I could have some morphine.”

“We’ll give you some paracetamol and codeine.”

This said, she told the nurses sorting bed linen that I was being discharged today so could they remake my bed. I was put on the chair.

By this point I was nearing tears with pain and I guess frustration with being kept in that state. She handed me the pot of pills and told me to call my parents to come and collect me, which I did. About an hour later she walked past to see to another buzzing patient and I told her that I was still in pain.

“Well if I give you the morphine then you’ll be jeopardising your discharge, is that what you want to do?”

“No,” I said, “I just don’t want to be in pain.”

Eventually she gave me a medicine pot of morphine and 10 minutes later my parents arrived. I told them what had happened and obviously they were pissed. My dad went down to the nurses station and asked when I could go. DN asked why he was here out of visiting times. My dad said that she’d asked me to call him. She said she hadn’t and said that the doctors on ward round had said that I couldn’t either. This had never been said to me. So apparently I was a liar.

She’d kept painkillers from me for hours. Had ignored me, treated me like shit and had talked to me like I was irrelevant. She was also making out that I was a liar. My parents didn’t believe her at all but still I got fairly upset. They stayed with me and got me back into bed as I was half asleep on morphine by this point. Eventually, on walking to the bed next to me, DN came by and snapped at us all “She’s staying.”

I didn’t see her again until my parents went and she came to sort my dressing. Perhaps paranoid but she hurt me quite a bit in the process.

Her attitude pretty much continued for the rest of my stay. She’d always have something to do before opening the cabinet above my head to give me medication and also gave me my venlafaxine when she felt like it rather than at the same time each day as I’d requested with an explanation about the side effects.

Luckily not all nurses were like this. Some were absolutely lovely and asked if I needed anything rather than seeing who would shout loud enough for help. I thought the buzzer situation was awful though. Hour long waits for help weren’t unusual. I just keep thinking how I’ll be back in there soon. Hopefully the DN won’t be mine again.