Blog Post 4

The Difficult Patient

I work in healthcare, and from time to time we get some difficult patients.  I’m talking about the truly offensive ones that make inappropriate sexual comments to the female staff and even try to touch their breasts, or butts, or crotches. 

We had one recently who was like this.  We traded out most of our staff that was caring for him so that most everyone was male.  It’s an easy, non-confrontational way to get them to stop.  There was still one female nurse that still had to take care of this patient.  The patient kept trying to grab at her crotch, and the nurse was very upset over being violated like that. 

Another coworker once remarked about a patient who had come in for a procedure and had nobody with him, and nobody to take him home afterwards.  He said, “Sometimes I wonder what these people have done that they have nobody left in their lives that cares about them.”  I think I know.

My father was in the hospital for about a week a couple years ago, being treated for a blood clot.  I was visiting him (another one of those things I did out of moral obligation) when he began to abuse a nurse in a similar manner. 

My brother and I were just sitting there in my father’s hospital room, making small talk, like you try to do when you are visiting someone in the hospital.  A nurse came in to do a check on him.  She tried to take his blood pressure and ask him a few questions about how he was doing, but my father had other things on his mind. 

He asked her to give him a bath. 

She politely told him no and tried to go on with her duties.

But my father insisted.  He needed a bath and he needed her to do it.  He really needed one.  Told her to go get a washcloth and give him a good rubdown.  He tried to grope her.

I was horrified, and he didn’t stop.  My brother told him to “Stop it.  You can’t talk to her like that.” 

But he continued. 

I got up and walked out of the room.  And left.  I was embarrassed that he was my father.  I was embarrassed that I even knew or associated with him.  I felt terrible for that nurse.

I had to go to the park and take a vigorous hike just to calm down. 

When I saw the fallout at work in how upset my coworker was at having to deal with a man very much like my father, it just reinforced my decision to not have any contact with him. She only had to deal with him for a few minutes at work.  I grew up with it.