Nurse Ratchet

As I carefully got out of the elevator, making sure my crutches didn’t get caught between the gap from the lift to the first floor, my heart raced. ‘To the right there Sinead,’ the nurse, Robert, who was obviously struggling to wheel the trolley which held my copious amount of bags instructed.

I turned the corner and was faced with a long, brightly lit corridor. With my head down, I noticed covid awareness stickers on the yellow linoleum floor every two meters. My heart fluttered with sadness. ‘Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore!’ I thought to myself.

As I found myself at the open double doors, the entry to the ward, I stood for a minute, Robert puffing and panting behind me. I hesitated. ‘Was I doing the right thing? Did I really need to be in here?’ I asked myself as Robert passed me by and turned into the female bay. ‘Shit!’ I wasn’t in the mood to be sharing a room with anyone. I was nervous, yet I had been waiting for this bed for five weeks so, reluctantly, I crossed the threshold and followed Robert into the large room with three beds, grateful to be ushered towards the bed in the corner.

As I sat down, Robert scratched his head catching his breath. I could hear the cogs in his mind turning. I had been here before and knew that Robert had a very nervous disposition. He looked towards the nurse’s station opposite the bay and called for Connie.

I shut my eyes in disbelief as to how Connie still was practicing nursing. She was completely incompetent and arrogant and rude. ‘Please be a different Connie, please be a different Connie,’ I chanted until there she was, pulling the curtain back a small bit and welcomed me back to the ward.

As she half-heartedly took everything out of the two suitcases, placing the contents on the bed, Robert frantically tapped away on the computer making a note of every item I had brought in. Even I had to admit that I had outdone myself this time. ‘You’ve brought a lot of stuff in!’ she voiced the obvious. All I could do was say, ‘yea’.

Inventory done, Robert and Connie left me to put my belongings wherever I deemed fit. As I knew I would only be in the bay for the short time it would take to free up a room, I decided to put everything that was non-essential in one case, leaving the rest for the other. It looked messy, but it was organised chaos. Just as I put the last item in the drawer, nurse Connie popped her head around the curtain again to say she was on her way home and that she would see me on Sunday. I had known Connie for a very long time. To call her a ‘weapon’ would be an understatement.

Connie was the type of nurse who was in it for the pay check. She skated by doing as little as she could get away with. She was dangerous to have on a psychiatric ward with thirty-three patients. She tended to be on mostly at the weekend, where the staff were short on the ground.

As I settled in, I barely conversed with my neighbour, Mary, who, to my relief, was as quiet as a mouse. I decided to give Connie another shot, wipe the slate clean, so to speak.

On Sunday I watched as she took eight blood pressures in a row without recording any of the readings. At lunch, she removed food from the patients dining room and ate it in the clinical room with the blind over the window down as the medication queue grew longer and longer. Eventually, she pulled back up the blind and began dispensing the drugs.

Saying Connie was hazardous whilst giving out the medication was like saying Vladimir Putin was an angel. When it came to my turn, she handed me my little pot full of pills, I counted them and flagged with her that they were wrong. She roughly took the pot back off of me and looked into it. She glanced at the computer, her heart obviously not in it. ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she asked me. ‘There are too many big round ones,’ I answered, my brow furrowed. ‘Well how many big round ones do you want?’ she retorted. She was always making mistakes. You needed to have your wits about you with Connie around. I am one of the lucky ones, I know what medication I’m on. When you come into a psychiatric hospital, you don’t come in for a holiday or a rest, you come in because you are mentally unwell. The nurses are supposed to be there to advocate for you when needed, and when you are asked a question like that, all trust is lost. I could have well said, ‘seven’, but its not in my nature. My medication is important, as is all of the patients, and I was shocked by her response. She was ready to bulk them up with whatever I requested.

With my back up, I went about my week as normal, thankful that she didn’t make an appearance for a few days. I played my bingo and did my therapies safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t on duty. I was relieved when the ward manager offered me a room which meant that I had a bit of privacy. There was a door instead of a curtain and I had control of the lights, meaning I could do my little activities into the small hours of the night.

Another Sunday came around quickly. I got up as normal, and as normal got my morning medication. At 10:30 there was a knock on the door. As the nurses had a fob to open any door in the hospital, Connie let herself into my room. She asked that I go down towards the nurse’s station to get my blood pressure checked. I picked up my crutches and put on my shoes to make the journey down the long corridor with the brightly coloured doors towards the office. I sat in the blood pressure chair. I waited for twenty minutes sitting there feeling like a lemon before getting up and returning to my room. Ten minutes later, Connie appeared again. And once again I hobbled towards the hot seat. ‘Does she not realise I have things to do?’ I said to myself as I took it handy on the freshly washed floor. Blood pressure done, and no records taken, I returned to my room once more.

After lunch, I sat in the designated ‘medication queue’ and waited to be served. Connie opened the door as the farthest person to my left got up to enter the clinical room. The rest of us moved up a seat. It always reminded me of musical chairs. When it came to my turn, I entered the newly painted white door and closed it behind me. I sat on the plastic red chair and was roughly handed my medication. I looked into the pot. There was something wrong. There was a red capsule in leu of an orange capsule and a white tablet.

‘Theres something wrong here Connie!’ I said, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. She roughly took the pot back and as before, glanced at the computer. ‘No,’ she said handing the pot back, ‘they’re right!’ I knew she was giving me pregabalin instead of gabapentin. I had been on pregabalin before and knew what it looked like. They were in the same family but were totally different drugs. I found myself having a full-blown argument with her. I was advocating for myself. We went back and forth, me telling her it was one thing and her refusing to believe me. She finally took out the box the alien tablet came from. It was clearly marked pregabalin. She checked it against the computer. ‘Oh!’ she sighed and dumped the whole pot into the hazardous waste bin and started again. Once again, she gave me the wrong medication, and once again I challenged her. Finally she took out the gabapentin and realised her mistake. I shook my head in disbelief that a trained nurse in a hospital like this could be so arrogant. That was the straw that broke the camels back. If this had happened to one of the old dears on the ward who didn’t know their tablets it could have been fatal.

I knocked on the ward managers door on the way back to my room. Unfortunately he was gone for the weekend. I decided to return to my room and record the issue on a complaints form. I didn’t want to be the reason for someone to lose their job, but at the same time the issue needed to be flagged. I knew he would be back on Monday so I bit my tongue until then.

Monday arrived and my blood was still boiling over the previous day. I passed the open door of the ward managers office. He was sitting at his desk on his computer. I nodded at him and retrieved the complaint form from my room. I knocked at his open door and entered with a kaleidoscope of butterflies in my stomach. I said nothing and just handed him the form. As he read it, his brow became more and more furrowed. He started to tap his fingers on the desk. I wasn’t sure whether I had done the right thing coming to him but I was afraid, not necessarily for me, but for the older demographic on the ward.

‘MMPPHH,’ he tapped his fingers again as he read my complaint once more. He asked me if I wanted to take the matter any further. I wasn’t comfortable with that. I wasn’t out to get her sacked or suspended, I just needed him to know. As I was putting my arms in my crutches preparing to leave, I just said, ‘you do what you need to do!’ and left him and his tapping fingers.

As luck would have it, Connie appeared on the ward that afternoon. At tea time I was fully aware that the ward manager had talked to her as she failed to acknowledge my existence. A pang of guilt wrapped across my chest. I had to remind myself as I looked around the dining room of the older generation tucking into their shepherd’s pie. I also had to remind myself that had she given me that much pregabalin, I could have died.

Two weeks of silent treatment from the lovely Connie was both blissful and uncomfortable at the same time. She was even more cold hearted that usual. Everyone on the ward was commenting on it, especially the new patients. She was rude and unnecessarily obnoxious to some of them. I forever wondered whether the ward manager had brought the issue to his superiors. I was just glad, five weeks after being admitted, that I was being discharged and could forget about her…...until the next time.

picture from pixabay