Brick to Your Head

This is going to sound really insensitive and probably tarnish the halo above my head but it was perhaps one of the funniest and most frustrating nights I ever had in the ER.

The city I work in is called the Brick City. I work in one of the larger hospitals in the town.  On a daily basis our ER is packed.  We might see 300 patients a day in the ER.  There are patients being seen in plastic chairs, there are stretches in the hallways, there are patients waiting for hours in the waiting room just waiting for a chance to get the main ER, when ambulance units arrive with stretchers patients have to be moved just so the medics can get through the hall to find an open bed.

The city has violence, it has gangs, homeless, it has a heartbeat that is uniquely it's own.  It's an energy like something I have never experienced anywhere else in the world.  Newark has that vibe.  It is crude, it is bold, and it is humbling.

One night we had a woman come into the ER with her loved one. They were from an upper middle class suburb about 45 minutes away from the Brick City.  She had come into the ER because she wanted her loved one to get clean and sober, a Friday night epiphany.  Believe me I am all for folks kicking their habits, but there were a couple of issues I had with this particular situation: 1) She was obnoxious, she felt that since she thought that she knew a doctor in the massive hospital, she was privileged.  2) we are not a detox facility and we didn't have what they needed, but we provided a referral, which she didn't think was good enough.  3) she demanded a private room, insinuating that she and her loved one were more important, although there was nothing critical about that person's condition, meanwhile there were seriously ill patients waiting for stretches, even if that was a bed in a hallway a foot away from another patient.

Our ER isn't pretty.  It doesn't smell good.  There are homeless folks in the waiting room, in the ER and waiting outside, but we are damn good at our jobs, even with nursing shortages and cutbacks.

Well on this particular night the person who came for detox was tired of waiting for a room, tired of waiting because we did not have services to offer him. After much ranting and raving from a loved one, the patient went out to smoke a cigarette.  Now leaving the ER to smoke is against our policy, but no matter what we said we, the staff, couldn't be right.  We were always wrong.  Well some might call it karma, but when this person went out to smoke after telling me to "F" myself,  he was hit in the head with a brick.

Welcome to the Brick City!

While I don't condone violence in anyway I also do not condone patients and their loved ones treating nurses like crap.