I could see nursing staff getting worried as I hesitated around February 2020 but that was just me having a flashback to when pubs were open. As an explanation, it seemed to work and – along with my refusal to believe that Boris Johnson was prime minister – they deemed me to be semi-compos mentis.
The other thing I learned was that no matter how many failed tries any staff member has to insert a cannula, there is always a genius on the ward who can be summoned to do it first time.
But the major lesson was that nurses appear to have no workload management system whatsoever and are constantly run off their feet.
Catering staff are the only people that really know what’s happening and can tell you, and porters must take some potion to be eternally cheery despite constant calls on the radio to push the likes of me around.
I’ve seen at first hand the huge amounts of extra work in hospital that Covid has brought for staff to try to keep people safe, often at risk to themselves. Either of the pittances offered by the Scottish and UK governments as pay rises is nothing less than an inexcusable insult to those efforts.
There are doctors, honestly. You can miss them if you go to the loo - as happened to me twice, including once on the day of discharge meaning I was the last to know. When the time came I hurriedly threw my bag over the arm a cannula had just been removed from and, after a brief return to get the bleeding stopped, I was on my way.
There must be a better way of doctors discussing your condition with you than at a bedside when all the other inmates can hear. Do they know that those curtains are not soundproof?
And don’t get me started on consultants. A definition must be a professional who knows masses about one thing and not a lot about anything else. This becomes a problem if, like me, you have two separate things wrong with you that interact. I still have to see the consultants separately and they still have to consult each other afterwards – till I see them both again, separately. I’ve grown a new respect for the knowledge and ability to explain exhibited by GPs.
Nurses, however, are the heroes of the piece. Most took time to reassure, check on me at night and chat about the real world when they could squeeze time. They even smiled sometimes at my repartee.
Their patience and caring when dealing with a drug addicted and abusive patient was an object lesson in kindness. Their reassurance to a man who feared from what he’d read in a tabloid that he’d be beaten up by other patients was superb. Mind you, given his ongoing expressed wisdom of the world based on the Daily Mail, he came close to me fulfilling his fear.
One day they asked a patient if they should phone his wife, to which he replied “which one?” Their restraint was admirable.
And it was not without its laughs. I got up to the loo in the middle of one night and when I opened the room door silently a group of nurses screamed. This shocked me a tad. Apparently they had been telling ghost stories on their break and I had appeared at a particularly eerie moment.
They were full of apology and explanation. Having my wits about me, I stayed a while in the loo and on the way back through the now silent group, I suddenly went: “Wooooo”. Worked a treat.
Or when a surgeon delved her finger into a wound and cheerily said, “I know what they say about surgeons, see a hole and you have to stick your finger in it”. Well, nurses’ shoulders shaking all around with barely stifled laughs until I broke the seal.
That’s not to say some nurses are not grumpy and skilled in the loud sigh. But those, and the ones who speak to you like a child because you are ‘old’ are thankfully the minority among a group whose ability to remain positive under such pressures is exceptional.
And I must say a bit about practice nurses in the community. The one with amazing dressing skills who always checks that all other parts of my care are being attended to. The lesson on replacing a dressing myself if need be once included: “Do it like this, not like the doctors do” and I am sure she was right.
Or when I greeted another with: “Good morning, how are you?”, I got the reply: “Better than you I suspect”. Little things like that make the visits all the more bearable.
I was given a really good snippet by a nurse who was applying pressure to my wound while helpfully telling me how she had reguarly done this with gunshot and stab wounds in an American trauma hospital. She gave the name ‘Ginger’ to a machine I was connected to. I asked her why.
She said it was because it could do everything she needed it to do. So she named it after Ginger Rogers who could do everything Fred Astaire could do, plus she could do it backwards and while wearing high heels.
So, nurses, take it as a huge compliment from me if I ever call you Ginger.
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