Have Your Hugged Your Nurse Today?

Okay, so my niece Wilhela (pronounced Willa) wants to know why I think only phone reps, flight attendants and waiters get the short end of the stick with hating to deal w/stupid people. What about nurses? Don't they need love too? So, in honour of Wilhela, here are things you shouldn't do to your healthcare providers.

My niece is a home health nurse. She's the nurse that comes into your homes to bathe, feed, perform physical therapy and anything else your doctor has ordered for your rehabilitation. She's met some very interesting people in her young, short life doing this and for the most part she says it's an okay field because she truly loves helping people, especially the aged. Note to Wilhela: see my earlier post about suckas who run through the aged's money. Wilhela sees first-hand how we close our sick and elderly away and pay others to care for them. She knows that routinely she's the only human contact her clients will have for days so she spends extra time w/them, asking about their youth, their children, past hobbies etc.

Like I said earlier, Wilhela, for the most part, loves her clients and her job. There are clients however, who think Wilhela's the housekeeper, banker, cook and gardener. I remember Wilhela telling me about a client who wanted her to water his lawn, run to the store for his snacks, pick up prescriptions, and deposit checks. All this after bathing and feeding him! When Wilhela finally put her size 10 foot down and told him her name is not Hazel (if you remember the show "Hazel" you know how old I am) or Florida (remember "Maude"?) and that if he needs all that work done, he should hire someone else. As soon as she left his home this guy gets on the phone to Wilhela's boss claiming she bad-mouthed him, stole money and wasn't taking care of him the way she should.

Well, this made Wilhela hot enough to boil water in the palm of her hand! She immediately found another nurse to replace her and dropped this guy. That showed him! By the 2nd week of no Wilhela, he was calling demanding, pleading and crying to have Wilhela back. Well, softie that she is Wilhela returned but made sure he understood she was not having all that housekeeping, personal assitant crap. I think they lived happily ever after.

Another episode Wilhela shared was the young paralyzed client who just loved having her bathe him. Wilhela said this guy would deliberately crap on himself so that she would have to wash him. Now, this guy was 24 and Wilhela was 19 and pretty cute. She looked a lot like me (not). Anyway, the guy's mother couldn't understand why her son would always have troubles holding his bowels whenever Wilhela was coming. During the week he was able to do just what he wanted but the morning of Wilhela's visits--crapping all over the place.

What Wilhela knew but felt too embarrassed to tell his mother was that guy would get extremely turned on when being washed down there. Sicko! Anyway, Wilhela told guy to stop crapping 'cause she didn't like cleaning his stanking tail crap and she didn't appreciate having to look at his arousal and hear him moaning while she was cleaning him. So she gave him an ultimatum: either stop crapping and getting off at her expense or she's telling mommy EVERYTHING! Wow, this changed that behaviour quickly.

So the moral of this story is "Don't be idiots!" Your nurses are not personal assistants. They're there to help make your physical life a bit better. This is from me: be nice and give them gifts sometimes. Can't get out and about? The gift of dollar bills will suffice anytime. Especially young nursing students like Wilhela.