Free The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital by Alexandra Robbins

will do a better job of putting ER patients at ease.”

Chapter 2
Crossing Doctor-Nurse Lines :
How the Sexy-Nurse Stereotype Affects Relationships with Doctors and Patients
    “I will not be ashamed to say ‘I know not,’ nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.”
    —Physicians’ Hippocratic Oath
    “The intimate nature of nursing care, the involvement of nurses in important and sometimes highly stressful life events, and the mutual dependence of colleagues working in close concert all present the potential for blurring of limits to professional relationships.”
    —
Code of Ethics for Nurses
, Provision 2.4
    “Lots of hot residents and nurses rush off to have quickie sex in utility closets during night shifts.”
    —a nurse practitioner in Virginia

MOLLY   September
Academy Hospital
    During Molly’s third week at Academy, a patient arrived at the ER already dead. Molly asked the charge nurse what kind of paperwork she needed to fill out.
    The nurse, who was about 22, looked perplexed. “Honestly, I’ve never had a dead patient so I don’t know. Can you ask someone else? I’m not getting patients out of here quickly enough. It’s just too overwhelming.”
    Molly tried not to show her surprise.
How are you in charge without ever having seen a dead body?
she wondered.
Twenty-two-year-olds have no business being in charge of an ER
.
    The patient load would have been considered a breeze at Pines; Molly had already come to think of Academy as easy money. Nurses here typically had no more than four patients, few of the patients were critically ill, and patients spent no more than thirty minutes in the waiting room.
    Molly wondered whether a recent shift in nurse training contributed to the girl’s inexperience. Traditionally, new nurses first had to work on the medical surgery floor to gain experience before moving to the ER and other critical care areas. The nationwide nursing shortage (or in some cases, short staffing) instead punted grads into more difficult areas of the hospital. Nurses were starting their career in the ER, OR, or ICU. “At Academy, some of the baby nurses don’t know what they don’t know,” Molly said. “And there are med students and new doctors who are also on the learning curve. At Pines, there were plenty of times that a doctor put in a wrong medication order, and an experienced nurse was there to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t seem right.’ But not at Academy. There’s potential for big mistakes with this young staff.”
    Many of the doctors at Academy were egotistical, but Dr. Cynthia Baron took the cake. Dr. Bitch, as Molly referred to her privately, was a resident who resembled Malibu Barbie, swishing her impeccably blown-out hair as she sauntered down the halls. She rarely deigned to talk to nurses unless she was angry with them or needed something, in which case she treated them like preschoolers: “Hi, pumpkin, can you do me a teensy favor? Thaaanks.”
    One day, a well-dressed 88-year-old woman came into the ER. Molly was prepping her assigned room when two nurses practically carried the wheelchair in, rickshaw-style, one tipping the chair back and the other holding the woman’s kicking feet to the leg rests to prevent the woman from pitching forward. Molly was horrified.
Do you really need to do that to this poor little old lady?
she thought.
    “I just want to go home!” the patient cried, thrashing about as the nurses set the wheelchair next to the bed. “I don’t want your help!” She tried to walk out of the room, but she was unsteady, and the nurses, assuming the woman was suffering from dementia, returned her to the chair.
    Molly, the patient’s primary nurse, quietly observed her. Dr. Baron poked her head into the room, saw the commotion, immediately ordered antipsychotic drugs for the patient, and left. Hospitals could hold a patient for seventy-two hours following an assessment, but Dr. Baron