This hospital used to be the place everyone went to. These days, I hate coming here. To be honest,…read moreit's not really the hospital itself--it's certain employees. Most of the staff are fine, but one person with a bad attitude and no sense of how to talk to people can make an already stressful situation much worse.
Our father was brought into the ER by ambulance. My family (four of us) was sitting in the trailer area off to the side, waiting for updates. An employee named Norma told us to move from the center seats to the wall seats because "people were going to come and it was going to get busy." We did as she asked.
My husband and I left briefly to get my mom something to eat from Starbucks. While we were gone, my younger sister mentioned to my son that she was hungry. Norma told her, "Yeah, you should go eat." First, why is she inserting herself into other people's conversations? Second, who tells someone in that situation to go eat without knowing what they may have just seen or been through? My son had watched my dad fall and start to convulse.
When I returned, my husband and son had left, and my older sister had arrived, so there were three of us waiting again while our mom stayed with our dad. I was sitting quietly on my phone, and my sisters were talking softly to each other. Norma approached us and said, "It's going to get busy in here and I need you guys to go."
My sister asked, "Go where?"
Norma replied, "You can go to the waiting room, you can go outside and wait, or you can go get something to eat."
I asked her if she thought it was safe for three women to be walking around outside in the dark. And once again with the food comment--who in their right mind tells family members to leave and go eat without knowing why they're there in the first place?
She then said we could sit in the waiting room "in the front." We had assumed the area we were already in was the waiting room. The real issue was her tone. Even as my sisters and I started walking out, she kept talking. I turned and told her, "You don't have to be so damn rude." I then asked her coworker for her name. The coworker said, "Norma." I heard Norma ask her coworker what I had said, so I turned back and said, "I asked for your name, Norma." She continued talking as we left--this was the point where she should have simply stopped.
We walked around the corner and found a bench. As I sat down to process the interaction, I looked down and saw an IV cannula lying on the ground.
There are things you just don't do. You don't invite trouble at work. That's why officers, EMTs, and firefighters never like hearing someone say "it's a quiet night"--you don't call a hard night into existence.
