I guess the title line pretty well sums it up for where we are and how I'm feeling about it. Although a substitute title might go something like "Mamas Don't Let Your Daughters Grow Up to be Bitch Nurses from Hell".
But the meat is in the details and details I've got. Plenty of them. And war stories from the maternity ward including the reincarnation of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a nervous Nellie of a nurse who saw fit to wake a sleeping baby not once but twice for her own peace of mind, fireworks from the second floor and lots of goodies from the discharge.
First off, I would like to start out by saying that, in general, the level of care we recieved at Dominican was superb. It was caring, gracious, informative and considerate. If it hadn't been for two of our last three nurses in the last 24-30 hours, we would have absolutely no beef whatsoever with the nursing staff.
But, with that said, I am compelled to relate the utter idiocy and smug condescension and outright rudeness that one of our last nurses exhibited. To the degree that P told her that she was no longer welcome and that she had to leave. And anyone who knows my usually mild mannered and gentle wife would know just how hard her buttons had been pushed by this pushy and overbearing idiot bitch in a nurse's outfit.
I'm sure that part of it is that we were in the hospital for five nights, that's a long time to be anywhere much less in a place where you have little control over your sleep, your privacy (pelvic exam anyone?) and none of those all-important comforts of home.
Anyway, let's take up the thread of the tale of Nurse Ellen aka Bitch Nurse from Hell or BNfH.
We'd gotten used to new faces, new nurses and shift changes, its just part of the deal when you're in a hospital. The last nurse had been a little difficult although her heart was very much in the right place, just her manner of expressing her concern over Graydon was ill advised and pretty disruptive. But we ironed things out with her and things were good.
And then she changed off with Ellen, a nurse who came bustling into our room, never bothered to introduce herself, never bothered to make any effort in any way to acknowledge that we had been caring for our son for the last couple of days and things were going well.
The first thing she said to me, because Graydon was fussing in his bassinet, was that we should get a pacifier in him. I told her that our birthing class instructor, the same one that worked in that ward, had advised us that it could be confusing to a newborn just learning how to breastfeed, to have a pacifier thrown into the mix. She looked down over her glasses at me and scowled condescendingly, "Oh that would be with Cynthia, wouldn't it, well, she's just anti-pacifier."
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner, the fastest nurse to alienate us yet. We took three classes before Graydon was born, all taught by Dominican staff and, assumedly, approved by the hospital administration for knowing just what the hell they are talking about.
The next warning bell was watching her actually interact with my son. She was very rough, pulling his arms and feet out of his sleep clothes with absolutely no regard for him, she just had her job to do and nothing was going to keep her or her hairy upper lip from getting it done.
I can't say how else she transgressed over the course of the night because I pretty much passed out on my fold out bed. I would wake up from time to time when P would walk buy with him in her arms, she might ask me for some help or whatever. And I'd jump up, help her out and then collapse again, barely even attaining consciousness.
P doesn't remember anyone saying it but I seem to recall a nurse saying they were going to come and get Graydon at 5 the next morning for a PKU test (basically its more infant blood letting and I'd already seen them screw it up on him twice with the CBC tests the day before). We weren't happy about the thought of more heel pricks but it was for the better and we were resigned to dealing with his being upset.
P was up early, early in the morning and woke me up at one point to excitely report that her milk had begun flowing. It had been a concern, especially because c-sections tend to have a longer delay between starting breastfeeding and the change from colostrum to milk. So she was stoked in very cool motherly fashion.
Instead of a 5 am call to go and do the PKU test, Nurse Ratched came in to our room in a big rush. She said they only had a half hour to get the PKU test done (in reality, we could have done it at any time, her SHIFT ended in a half hour and it was one of her duties to get it taken care of but she's a slacker and left it for the last minute). P was feeding Graydon at the time and said that she'd start getting moving in a second.
Now follow closely because this is where the alternate universe comes in.
This overbearing bitch had the audacity to take her finger and insert it into our son's mouth and remove him by her force from my wife's breast while he was eating. She said something along the lines of, "Well, I'll just have to get things going now then, won't I?"
Now, its a lucky thing for her that I was asleep or I might have lost my temper and thrown her through a wall for having the sheer, unmitigated gall to impose herself upon us like that. But no, I was out cold.
It gets worse too.
She basically took our son from my wife, stripped him down to nothing, put him in a crib and basically wanted to take off with him. P said she wanted to go along, as her alarm bells were going berserk that this woman really wasn't to be trusted with our child. Nurse Ratched tried to talk P into not going but P stood by her rights and said that yes, she was most definitely going along now.
So the BNfH gave in and they started out. Now P has just had major surgery in having Graydon removed from her body, she's moving slowly and deliberately. But the BNfH didn't care in the least, she took off down the hall way, almost running with Graydon in the crib to get him to the testing in time to get it on her shift records. P yelled at her to stop and wait for her, which she did very, very reluctantly. Keep in mind that we now have an almost naked newborn in the crib (since the uncaring bitch didn't even think to give him a blanket to cover up in) and she's trying to race to cover her own boil infested ass.
At the testing, she (BNfH) was trying to hurry things up and said that the test had to get done by 7:30. When P said she'd been up since 5, the BNfH tried to twist it into P saying that she didn't want the PKU done this morning and wanted the next shift to do the test (which was a really cheesy way for her to duck out of her duties and lay the blame on us, a truly caring and patient oriented nurse, oh yeah). When P said no, she had no problems doing the test now, it was just that she didn't need to be rushed and had been up and ready since 5. BNfH again tried to wiggle out of her responsibility and more signs that she shirked her duties by trying to claim that we wanted to change the PKU test time.
And P lost it. Not in a bad way at all, she told the nurse that she didn't mind doing the test now, that it was fine to do it right now but that she, the BNfH, was no longer welcome to have anything to do with her, our baby or me. And that's when the Charge Nurse stepped in, ran the test (which Graydon went through without a peep even though they had to jab a hole in his heel again) and everything was all good.
And that's the tale of the Bitch Nurse from Hell who should lose her job because of things like this. I can't imagine that we're the first patients she's dealt with like this, my feeling is that she gets away with her overbearing, brutish and rude nature because she deals with a lot of younger mothers who are grateful for any help at all, even if that "help" is really someone just trying to control them. P and I look fairly young and I think she thought she could just steam roll us as well. But she didn't take into account the fact that P is a lot tougher than she looks.
In my mind, the BNfH got off easy. We're still going to write a letter to the hospital administration and, if they don't react in a manner that appeases us, we'll publish the ordeal in a letter to the local newspaper.
The hospital and birth and homecoming stories are thick and heavy for right now. The next one may actually even end up in a negligent malpractice lawsuit but I've tapped too long and am going to post this and then go down and gaze with wide wonder at my son.
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