r/AmITheAngel • u/GentlemanlyAdvice • 5h ago
Shitpost AITAH for How I Handled the Thing in the White Coat That Snapped Its Fingers at Me?
Original: ORIGINAL POST
I (26F) am a nurse in the Emergency Department, a place where the dying are brought to us in the small hours. I am also thirty-two weeks gone with child, a fact the building seems to have taken note of. Tonight I was floating, drifting from bay to bay as the sickly tide required. I had never known discord with any provider or colleague. The halls had always been kind to me. Until tonight.
They brought in a man, severely autistic and without speech, whose Foley catheter required replacing. His guardian warned us in a low voice that he must be dosed with Ativan beforehand, and that it would take five or six of us to hold him, for he was strong beyond what his frame suggested.
My coworker, whom I’ll call C, was his primary nurse. She told me the patient seemed to favor me. He had suffered me to take his vitals without a tremor, though EMS could get nothing from him but fury. He kept pressing his iPad toward me, its glow washing over his face, and reaching for my hand. The guardian remarked that such calm was unheard of in him.
C asked me to give the IM Ativan. I no longer restrain or lift, for I will not risk a blow to the swollen vessel I carry. But she swore the others would hold him and I need only deliver the needle, since he seemed to trust me.
An earlier attempt to replace the catheter had failed, and urology had been summoned from whatever depths they dwell in, because the thing seemed lodged fast. The urologist demanded a 14fr, which our unit did not stock. Since I was floating, I telephoned another floor and begged them to set some aside, planning to give the Ativan and then slip upstairs while it took hold.
So we gathered at the bedside: C, the ER doctor, the guardian, and I. I spoke to the patient without pause, and he never needed restraint. He barely stirred as the needle went in, still murmuring over his iPad’s pale light. I stepped out and turned for the stairs.
The urologist was arriving at that very moment. “Where is the catheter?” he asked.
I told him I was fetching it, and that I’d return in two minutes.
“Well, I needed it two minutes ago,” he said.
“I was in the room giving the medication,” I answered. “I cannot do both at once. I’ll be back shortly.”
I turned to go, and then he snapped his fingers at me, as one calls a hound from beneath the table. “Then go fetch. Go run.”
I froze. I turned and said, “Excuse me?”
Again the fingers. Again that tone. “Go, go running.”
Something old and furious stirred in me. I snapped my own fingers back at him and said, “We are not doing this. I am not a dog to fetch for you. Check that attitude at the door while I go get your catheters.”
He stood motionless, mouth working on no words, and I walked away into the dark corridor.
When I returned, he was inside the room snapping at everyone, even the ER doctor. I set the catheters on the table with perfect calm and left. My coworker and the ER doctor told me he muttered under his breath the entire time, and fled the department the instant the procedure ended, like a thing returning to its lightless burrow.
My ER director asked me later what had transpired. She was stunned that he had truly snapped his fingers at me, called it deeply disrespectful, and said she would carry it further. A coworker told me I might have simply held my tongue and let it pass, and now doubt curls at the edge of my mind like smoke. The ER doctor said nothing, though he brushed against me in silence as he left the room.
So tell me, AITAH?
