With delirium just a memory,
nurses are OK folks

Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

The title of the Osmond Brothers’ hit song, One Bad Apple Don’t Spoil the Whole Bunch Girl, has proved true more times in my life than I care to admit.
Eight years ago I gave birth to our third child at our local hospital, which at the time did not have the greatest reputation, particularly for its nursing staff. But the morning of my scheduled cesarean went off without a hitch, and before I knew it I had caught my first glimpse of our beautiful baby daughter. At least I think I did, because I was so heavily medicated they could have held up a monkey and I would have smiled.
But we have the evidence on video, so I’m pretty convinced I was cooing at my baby’s face, and not some chimp’s.
That afternoon, however, was a different story. About three hours after the arrival of our blessed event, I began to feel uncomfortable. About 10 minutes after that I was in excruciating pain.
I pushed the call button for the nurse, and instead of running to my rescue, she stayed firmly planted at the desk and took her good old time responding to me via the intercom. After informing her of my pain level, which on a scale of 1 to 10 was about a 27, she came lollygagging into the room and glanced up at the IV that was supposed to be administering morphine.
She claimed that everything looked good. Then she was gone, leaving me to suffer. Another 20 minutes went by and my husband, fearing for his own life as well as mine — I hear I threatened to go ballistic on the next person I saw if something wasn’t done to alleviate the pain — called her back to the room.
Once again, Nurse Ratched dutifully glanced at the IV, saw nothing amiss and left. Two unbearable hours later I noticed a tube dangling by my bedside attached to . . . nothing?
Nothing????
I grabbed the tube, swung it in the air and screamed just like Shirley MacLaine in that scene from the movie Terms of Endearment (where she freaked because the nursing staff was slow in giving pain medication to her daughter, played by Debra Winger, who was dying of cancer).
"IS THIS MY MORPHINE?" I shrieked.
This brought a different nurse — running, I might add — who brilliantly assessed the situation, and all hell broke loose. The rest of my stay remains a bit of a blur, only because the nurses who followed became quite diligent about keeping up with my pain management.
Which leads me to think that, as patients, we should reserve the right to ask our nurses, "Are you a good nurse or a bad nurse?" This is sort of like Glinda asking Dorothy, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?", but the nurse version is a reasonable question because I have learned the hard way that a good nurse can make all the difference.
And so it was last week that I needed to bring my 8-year-old daughter to this very same hospital. She was playing at a friend’s house when the mom called me and calmly said, "I think Maddy broke her arm."
Besides being a dear friend, this mom happens to be a former NICU nurse and therefore has the ability, unlike me, to stay calm in any situation. By the time my husband and I arrived, she had Maddy’s arm on ice and in a makeshift splint.
My husband drove us to the ER, where they promptly x-rayed the arm and saw it was indeed broken. It turned out that Maddy had to stay overnight. As we sat with her, a nurse wheeled in a bed for me so that I wouldn’t have to spend the night sitting upright in a chair.
The next morning, another nurse brought me breakfast, all the while apologizing for the noise throughout the night. And still another nurse gave Maddy a cuddly stuffed chicken because she was being so brave and hardly acting like a chicken.
I’m not quite sure how this hospital has managed to weed the bad nurses from the good nurses, but from now on I am going to assume that all the nurses there are good.
And should I come across one who isn’t, I shall remind myself that one bad nurse don’t spoil the whole bunch girl. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net