Book about patients

I keep saying I am going to write a book... a book about all the people I have taken care of... anonymously of course.  It has crossed my mind in the last few days that people seriously do not understand each other, or humanity.  What human beings are really like.  Once you have taken care of them, it is easier to get an idea about what they are really like...

As a nurse you care for everyone.  Sickness has no economical or social boundaries.  It doesn't matter if your patient is in maximum security prison and has been shackled to the hospital bed with two guards standing by it and one by the door, or if he is a rock star leader of his community with the same guards at the door, but for a different reason... both of them can have a heart attack or get cancer.  And yes, I have cared for both.

Patients can be really anyone.  It was the alcoholics and drug addicts that took up most of my time, and they were rarely truly sick.  Their illnesses were usually something secondary to their addiction, like the man whose toe and then foot had to be amputated because he was an alcoholic and ignored an infection.  Then there was the woman with chirrosis of the liver who pulled out her IV repeatedly and left the hospital to buy liquor, the drug addict who asked for a cocktail so powerful at bedtime med time that she literally passed out and had to be reversed, and the patient who had bladder cancer and had a bladder created but was so drunk off Dilaudid all the time that she could barely function... these were the people who wasted the time of the people who were really sick.

The paraplegic who got into a screaming argument with me because she was on four narcotics and we can't give those all at once in the hospital- where was her pain anyway?

Then there were the husbands.  Some men really can't handle their wives or mothers or girlfriends being sick, and they leave.  Never show up.  Or come halfheartedly and can't stay.  Men with the opposite issue who can't stand to see their wives in a hospital bed and take it out on everyone- every nurse who walks in the door gets an earful of verbal abuse.

Speaking of abuse... then there are the families.  A daughter who comes in at 7am right when I get on shift and demands to know why the night nurse didn't medicate her mother for pain, when she did at 6am, and screams at the top of her lungs until you find the doctor on call and give her some more, or the daughter who does the same thing and then calls you a liar and screams at you all the way down the hall... these were the people I got to work with.