99 per cent of the hospital staff were top notch. They had to put up with horrible people in a horrible situation. Some of the patients were a bit nasty to the nurses and there were some difficult patients that were just struggling with pain or maybe had some mental issues. I don’t know which of them categories I fell into but I can remember the 3 nurses which I wouldn’t like to receive care from again. The first was a woman who seemed to love waking up the patients at 8am and not even trying to be nice about it. Bare in mind I had probably been up most of the night in pain and it was quite a struggle for me to move quickly anyway. She would snap “get up and out of your bed”. I couldnt understand why they made us all get out of bed at 8am for breakfast when some people would struggle. Its not like we had anywhere else to go during the rest of the day.
One morning she was hurrying me out of bed and telling me to get into my chair. I had a bit of a moan and asked why we needed to, it felt like I imagine a prison to feel. She said “I have to be here as well, and for 12 hours at a time, and I don’t want to be here”. The reply I gave got a bit of a chuckle from one or two of the old boys but also some frowns. I said “aye but you get paid for it, we have to stay here 24 hours a day and I’ve been here a week. Do you think I’m loving it like I’m at the Hilton?” She really was in the wrong job. She was even rude in front of my family and a little bit to my mum.
Most of the nurses were always keen for a laugh to brighten up there day as well as ours. There was one who you couldn’t possibly have a laugh with as she took her job far too seriously. The rule that only 2 people could visit at once would be broken on the regular but when she was on shift she would make people wait in the waiting room down the corridor. For me being hooked up to a tube which was plugged into the wall this was a problem. Even the old guy who I got on with the best used to make nazi salutes behind her back or if you were on your phone and he spotted her coming. That was another thing she hated, using mobile phones. All the other nurses told me that using that and my e-cig were both fine but she wouldn’t have either. I used my phone to connect my laptop to the internet so that I could play poker. It was annoying if you were in the middle of a hand and she would come in and disrupt things.
There was a 3rd evil nurse but I’ll get to her later. The nice ones helped make things better. There was a lovely Polish nurse who I would speak to quite a lot. When she would be changing my dressing we would be discussing politics, the indy referendum or Russia/Poland relations. She was a really nice girl and the old boys could see I liked her so they liked to joke about it when she was there. She would close the curtain to change the dressing around the entry to my chest and they would joke when she pulled back the curtain that she had spent 45 minutes with me and only 5 with them. They liked a bit of a joke like that. For example, a day or two after I had been moved to this ward the nazi nurse had told me I needed to get a swab done for MRSA. It was a swab under the testicles. She held my testicles up out of the way and swabbed away. When I asked the old boys about it they told me she had let them do the swab to themselves and that I’d been felt up by a pervert nurse.
One day another nurse was changing my dressing with the curtain closed. The young Polish cleaner came in and the old guys said “that young cleaner is here for you, she says she’s going to polish something for you”. I didn’t think she was actually there so I joked back “well she’ll need a bloody big cloth”. The curtains were pulled back seconds later and she was standing there giggling with a red face.
I was the only patient in my ward that had paid the extortionate amounts for my private telly to work so when it was Manchester United vs Bayern Munich, the old boys came over with their chairs and watched it sat around my bed until nazi nurse came in and told them to get back to their beds like they were children. All in all it wasn’t as horrible a time as it could have been in there.
Collapsed Lung to Growing Guns 