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Truthfully, I was feeling morally gray right now, and I wasn’t sure how to reconcile that.
My gaze firmly on the floor, I opened the door to the bathroom, and immediately went upstairs to the postpartum floor and smiled my way into getting four cans of formula.
I came back down to the ER with my loot, and smiled as I made it into the woman’s room.
Her eyes were heavy and slightly dejected when they came to me but lit up upon seeing the cans of formula.
“These were about to expire,” I said to her. “They’ll last you well into the end of next month, according to the expiration date, but I managed to sneak one of the cans that doesn’t expire until the end of the year, too. Just in case. I’m going to put these in your hospital bag, okay?”
The baby, who had been sleeping quite soundly until I’d walked in, woke with a jerk and started looking around.
I winced. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t have any bottles,” she murmured.
“Oh!” I snapped my fingers and reached into my pocket, pulling out the two smaller bottles that I’d managed to snatch from there, too.
“And this one,” I said as I showed it to her. “Fits onto a water bottle. You can feed the baby just with this alone as long as you can find a water bottle.”
The mom’s eyes finally warmed.
The baby started to scream then, and I said, “These are small, and I have no clue how much the baby’ll eat since you’ve been breast feeding and all, but they’ll do in a pinch, right?”
The mom nodded, sitting up, and wincing as she did.
God, I couldn’t even imagine how an infection like that would feel in my breasts. Poor mom.
“Looks like your antibiotics are almost finished, too,” I said as I checked all the lines. “I’ll go let your nurse know.”
Feeling somewhat better about everything, I headed out to the main ER and found that there were a bunch of nurses gathered around the nurses’ station.
I headed in that direction and stopped the nurse in charge of the mom’s care.
“Hey,” I said to her. “Your patient’s IV is almost finished. I got her lined up with some formula, but she’s gonna need a bigger bag to take it all home.”
“She’s gonna need more than that,” Jasmine murmured. “The poor thing. She’s homeless and is living in a shelter. She works two jobs to make ends meet, and if my guesses are correct, I think she’s running from someone.”
That was awful.
But it got my mind to thinking…
“Hey, your lunch is up, Ellodie!” the charge nurse said from the middle of the huddle.
“What’s going on?” I asked Patricia, the charge nurse.
“Cops are here asking questions,” Patricia rolled her eyes. “Patient in room three assaulted a nurse.”
Anger boiled in my gut.
This was exactly what I was fucking talking about.
Working in this emergency room was becoming ridiculously unsafe.
Even worse, it was par for the course.
I’d yet to work in a hospital, or do clinicals during my schooling, that cared even an iota about their employees. It was as if they were just ambivalent. This was income to them. They just saw dollar signs while the rest of us nurses saw patients.
The director needed to get his head out of his ass before everyone went on strike, which was what they were considering, and had been talking about for the last week.
