The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital (37 page)

The patient, a young man in his twenties, was whimpering in pain. His bleeding was well controlled and his family was on the way. There was little that Sam could do for him because he was in a limbo between the ER and OR. Sam found two anesthesiologists in the operating theater. “Do you know who I can give report to?” Sam asked. She had to thoroughly update a nurse from the admitting department on the patient’s condition before she left.

“No,” said the more senior doctor. The doctor turned to the patient. “Have you ever had surgery? Did you have any problems with it? Okay, open your mouth.” Anesthesiologists checked patients’ mouths before surgery because if the patient had a large tongue or the roof of the mouth hung low over the throat, then intubation would be more challenging.

Sam wasn’t allowed to return to her other patients until she gave report on this one. After several minutes of waiting around, she asked the male anesthesiologist about the delay.

“We’re still waiting for the on-call vascular attending to get here,” he answered.

“Can I get fentanyl for him while you’re figuring this out?” she asked. Her patient desperately needed pain medication.

“No,” the doctor said, and resumed doing paperwork.

Sam, exponentially more confident than she had been in August, stared down the more senior anesthesiologist. “Really? You want him to sit here in pain when you guys were the ones who wanted him to come upstairs and I could have gotten him pain medicine downstairs, so he’s up here in pain because of you?”

The doctor sighed. “Fine,” she said, and wrote the orders.

By the time Sam retrieved the fentanyl and administered it to the patient, there was still no news on the surgery status. Sam was frustrated: She had nowhere else to take him, and she had five other patients downstairs who needed her, including a woman in bad shape and bound for the ICU.

Typically, taking a patient to the OR was a quick and easy trip. If Sam had known this visit would have been so complicated, she would have asked a less busy nurse to escort the patient. Sam circled the floor, asking the anesthesiologists and the PACU nurses for the name of the person who had given the okay for the patient to come upstairs, so she could finally give report.

“Here,” the senior anesthesiologist said, handing her a piece of paper. “Call this number. It’s the senior surgical resident.”

Sam had a feeling the doctor was giving her a task just to shut her up. Reluctantly, she dialed. “Who gave you this number?” the surgeon barked when Sam reached him.

Sam realized that the anesthesiologist had given her the doctor’s personal cell phone number rather than his hospital cell. (“That was completely inappropriate! It was a doctors’ pissing match,” she said later.)

The surgeon ranted to her about the anesthesiologist. “Anesthesia had no right to give you this number,” he fumed. “No one is on their game tonight. The OR has had problems all week.”

Sam fidgeted with her glasses.
The ultimate goal is taking care of the patient, not seeing whose stethoscope is longer
, she thought. She didn’t care about interdepartmental politics; and she had heard that tension between surgeons and anesthesiologists was common. Sam just wanted to get back to her patients.

“I need to go. I’ll just leave the patient in the PACU with the nurses.”

“That’s fine,” the surgeon said.

When Sam wheeled the patient to the PACU, she found a nurse surfing the Internet. “The surgeon says to leave the patient here. I have five other patients to get back to.”

The annoyed nurse took Sam’s report. Later, Sam learned that after seventeen hours of surgery, the patient would make a full recovery.

When he left the bar, William called Sam. He explained that someone had blurted out that she had dated the intern and a few of the residents, making her sound like the hospital tramp.

“Funny, I didn’t realize I was going on these dates,” Sam retorted. “Who said this?”

William sighed. “Okay, so what happened between you and CeeCee?”

“Oh. Well. CeeCee and I don’t make beautiful music together,” Sam said, and recounted when CeeCee had discovered that Sam said she drove her crazy.

William told her that the group had been drinking. Out of nowhere, CeeCee had declared that Sam had been hostile to her. She launched a diatribe about what a horrible person Sam was, and then claimed that Sam had dated four guys who worked at the hospital (none of whom Sam had dated). Dr. Spiros had chimed in, “Oh yeah, she went out with me, too,” as if something had happened between them. Dr. Spiros was now dating another tech.

CeeCee then burst into loud drunken tears. “Why do you even like her? She’s so mean!” she wailed to William. Surrounding bar patrons turned to watch her drama.

Eventually, CeeCee’s friends had dragged her out of the bar before she could make more of a scene. Later that night, CeeCee texted William: “I hope you and I are okay.”

Once again, Sam was beset by unfounded rumors of promiscuity at her workplace when she tried hard to avoid drama, let alone extraneous personal interaction in general. And self-absorbed girls like CeeCee didn’t even get embarrassed by their own ridiculous behavior.

People had done this to Sam since high school: Because she was quiet, they projected onto her a superficial image of the character they assumed she was. Because she was opinionated and did not mince words, that character was often negative, and because she was chesty and men found her attractive, that character was presumed to be a slut. Sam tried not to get caught up in what other people thought about her. But these types of rumors motivated her to work even harder. “I need to be really good at what I do if people are going to think ill of me without even knowing me,” Sam explained.

Sam didn’t claim innocence; she shouldn’t have said CeeCee drove her crazy when they were interns. But at least she had respected CeeCee as a nurse. Confronting CeeCee would only exacerbate the hostilities. “I feel like I should wear a plaid skirt and carry a backpack to work,” Sam told a friend. “It’s like high school, except for the dying people.”

Carl, one of Molly’s Citycenter patients, weighed more than 300 pounds and was missing a leg. He complained of chest pain but wouldn’t let anybody treat him. When Molly told Carl, who was homeless, that his discharge orders had come through, he crossed his arms. “I’m not going anywhere because I want to kill myself,” he said, smug.

Molly was unfazed. This was a popular game among homeless people so that they could score “three hots and a cot.” They would come to the ER, try to gain admission to the psych ward, refuse treatment, and get a warm bed and meals. Many hospitals automatically admitted any patients who mentioned depression or suicide, even if the staff knew they were bluffing. But here was one thing Citycenter did right: Molly called the crisis counselor, who spent three minutes with Carl, then told Molly to resume discharging him.

“But I’m going to kill myself!” Carl insisted.

“The crisis team thought there was a low likelihood of that, so here are your discharge instructions,” Molly replied.

“Just set them on my chest because when I go outside and kill myself, I want everyone to see them and know you don’t give a shit about me.” The man leaned back in his chair, splayed his arms dramatically, closed his eyes, and pretended to be dead.

Molly shrugged. “Okay.” She set the instructions on his chest and walked away. “I’ll call security to come help you,” she said while leaving. Carl wheeled himself out of the building.

Later that week, the hospital’s CEO sent an email to the ER staff. The Joint Commission had performed a follow-up investigation and had determined that the ER could keep its accreditation. Molly was stunned. “I can’t believe they found nothing!” she said.

The department had improved slightly; Molly didn’t get sick to her stomach on the way to work anymore. For her, the biggest difference at Citycenter was that the ER created a dedicated trauma nurse position. Because Molly was always assigned to the sickest patients, she was now able to concentrate on Zone 1 patients without having to abandon them immediately whenever a trauma came in.

The rooms still weren’t as clean as they should have been, however. Nurses were supposed to call housekeeping as soon as they discharged each patient, a practice that had quickly fallen by the wayside. And now that TJC had come and gone, Citycenter was trying to control the budget by creeping the nurse-patient ratios back up again.

Undercover observation conducted for this book during this time revealed multiple violations of TJC standards. At one visit, floors, supply drawers, carts, tubes, and equipment were spattered with dried blood; urine samples had spilled across a counter in a lab room; and bloody gauze was strewn over a sharps container. In the utility room where nurses brought pregnancy tests, a urine-soaked absorbent pad lay on the counter beneath a hospital binder.

Elsewhere, the ER didn’t use proper TJC notification systems, and a tech blatantly flirted with a visitor as he held down a patient who was being catheterized and moaning in pain. And when a pregnant woman came in with vaginal bleeding, worried that she had miscarried, the ER doctor discharged her without bothering to tell her that her fetus was fine.

Molly would continue to take shifts at Citycenter, but she knew that it wasn’t the hospital she was looking for. She didn’t like that Citycenter and Academy hired new grads directly into the ER and that she was considered one of the most senior nurses, with only ten years of experience. “There’s no one for me to learn from,” she said. And while Academy was easy, it was too easy for her to consider working there permanently: “There aren’t enough sick people there for me to help.”

Molly took a few extra shifts at Academy so that Jan, the grateful young nurse, could spend time with her long-distance boyfriend. Molly was in triage when she heard a familiar voice in the lobby. “How long have you been waiting?” a man asked other patients. “What’re
you
in for? I’m suicidal.” It had been only six days since Carl had visited Citycenter, at least when Molly was working.

Molly finished assessing her patient. When she finally called Carl back, he was sweet as pie. “I’m suicidal,” he repeated, giving her puppy eyes.

“Uh-huh,” Molly said.

“Are you a nurse?” he asked her.

“Yes, I am. I’ve also been
your
nurse at Citycenter.”

“Really? How’d you know it was me?”

Nurses called patients like Carl “frequent flyers” or “hospital hoppers.” One man called an ambulance at least once a day to visit the Pines, Academy, Avenue, or Citycenter ERs, complaining of “uncontrollable farting.” Molly was incredulous that EMS was required to transport him and that ERs gave him IV fluids, food, drinks, clean clothes from the hospital’s donation closet (collected mostly from staff), and a bed. Several drug-seeking frequent flyers claimed to have sickle cell disease and asked for Dilaudid. This was a shrewd tactic; nursing schools taught students not to treat sickle cell patients as drug seekers because they had legitimate pain. Many doctors went ahead and gave these patients six Percocets, then discharged them.

“Why do y’all give in?” Molly asked one of the Academy doctors about a drug seeker. “He goes to a different hospital every day of the week. I would bet my last dime he sells the pills.”

The doctor shrugged. “I sometimes find it easier to give drug seekers what they want than deal with them raising hell.”

Molly knew of one drug seeker who had gone to an ER every day that Molly had worked for the past six years. “I want to know how he still has Medicaid,” Molly said. “That’s a minimum of $600 to $800 per visit. Conservatively, that’s $1.3 million to support a drug dealer and addict. I worry about what will happen to healthcare costs if we can’t get our act together.” When he became her patient, she used a larger needle than necessary on purpose to draw his blood; it was the only time she had ever practiced punitive medicine. Less than an hour after he left Citycenter, he showed up at another ER to get more drugs.

The ER abusers who most infuriated Molly were the homeless people who claimed they had a problem—chest pain, abdominal pain—so that the ER, as required, started a full workup. Then they would ask for a sandwich. “Some will even admit that the only reason they came in was for a sandwich,” Molly said. “Are you effing kidding me? You think taxpayers should pay six hundred dollars so y’all can get a sandwich?!”

Another abuse of the system routinely occurred on weekends at Citycenter, which wasn’t far from a jail. Come morning, people incarcerated for drunk driving or drunk and disorderly conduct looked for any excuse to leave their cell. Police escorted a 22-year-old college student from jail to the ER because he had slept in his contact lenses and claimed he needed eye drops. “To avoid doing paperwork, sometimes the police ask patients if they want to go to jail for being drunk and disorderly in public or to the hospital. Of course they choose the hospital!” Molly said.

ERs were packed with nonemergencies. One patient came into the ER complaining of acne. Another man showed up because his barber told him he was going bald. And then there were the patients who visited the ER simply because it fit best with their schedules. Several patients checked in because their doctor couldn’t see them until the afternoon. One of Molly’s Academy patients had an outpatient prescription for an ultrasound, but said, “The line was too long, so I came here.” Instead of paying $200 for the exam, the patient’s insurance company would now pay the minimum of $600 for an ER visit plus approximately $500 for an “emergency” ultrasound.

Molly decided to emulate another triage nurse, who greeted patients by asking, “And what’s your emergency today?” While the phrasing wouldn’t embarrass patients enough to leave, perhaps it would discourage them from coming to the ER the next time they had a nonemergency complaint.

Juliette was working triage with Erin when a thin man in his late fifties came in. He had pulmonary problems and his doctor sent him to the ER because of an irregular EKG. His vitals were fine. “Do you have any chest pain?” Juliette asked him.