Helpful Nursing Advice: Surviving Staff Meetings

Sometimes when I’m in a long staff meeting, and I’m listening to the third repetition of why the new policy is important, and what we must do to comply with the new policy, and how the new policy is obviously superior in every way to the almost-identical former policy that didn’t take as much time, effort, or heartbreak to consistently implement, I take a deep breath and then look around and consider seriously what each person in the meeting would look like in Muppet form.

Top Ten All Time Unbearable Visitors: Classic Nurse Humor

10. The man who snuck in his three cats to visit his asthmatic wife.

9. The visitor who ate all his father’s food, then rang the nurse to say that the patient was still hungry and needed another tray.

8. The wife who asked you to take her stroked-out husband to the bathroom whenever SHE really was the one who had to go.

7. The son who emptied his mother’s colostomy bag into the waste basket at the nurse’s station.

6. The male visitor who fell asleep in the patient’s bed while she was in the bathroom.

5. The wife who discontinued her husband’s CVP line herself, because “John likes to sleep on his right side.”

4. The 80 year old daughter of the 98 year old man, who kept drinking her father’s continuous IV fluids whenever she got thirsty.

3. The children of one patient who insisted upon using their mother’s portable IPPB machine as a scooter in the hallway.

2.The husband who kept sneaking in chocolates for his newly diagnosed diabetic wife. The jig was up when he hid them under her roommate’s bed and the whole room was infested with cockroaches.

1. The man who never actually visited his brother, but called 12 times every shift to criticize the nurses, the doctors, the food, and anything else that came to mind.