The (nurse) eye roll

Nurses and other healthcare workers experience some of the most ridiculous aspects of the human beast.  Things that naturally provoke the single eyebrow arch and the “Are you kidding me?” stare.  Were we comedians and satirists, our flow of material would be steady.  But since we [generally] strive to at least project nonjudgmental concern, we have developed  a highly adapted skill.  The psychological eye roll.  While our face may be stoic and eyebrows knotted in perceptible concern, there are times our optic nerves are doing log rolls as we try suppress the reaction a confrontation with ridiculousness wants to make dance across our features.

Since the best treatment is prevention and education, let me share with you a few of the scenarios that were you to perform, would most certainly be evoking from your nurse or doctor the psychological eye roll.

1. If you are thirty and you are a man and your mama is hovering protectively over your gurney and alerting the nurse every time you get a new belly pain – eye roll.

2. Anyone who rates their pain above 10 on the 1-10 scale.  You only get get 10. You don’t get 11. You don’t get 14. And you certainly don’t get 100.  As a co worker put it, Are you being lit on fire while someone simultaneously crushes your femurs? No? Then your pain isn’t a 14/10. Eye roll!

3. If you collapse at the front desk and we rush you back to a room where we discover your chief complaint is menstrual cramps…. eye roll.

4. Anyone in their 20s who “collapses” in the waiting room and does not also have an organ that just ruptured, significant blood loss, or a bone showing… eye roll.

5. An anguished cry for ‘Help, help, somebody help me!’ followed by a teary request for water, blankets, or pillows. Eye roll.

6. If you come in for a sprained ankle on a busy night and then angrily inform the staff that you could have died in the waiting room and no one would have known. Eeeeye roll.

7. You hurt your knee/ankle/wrist/pinky at the mall and can think of no other way to get treatment than to call an ambulance. Eye roll.

8. You’re in the worst pain of your life but can somehow manage to munch on your doritos and laugh with your friends… you got it, eye roll.

9. You did not put that lotion bottle in your own rectum, you somehow sat on it just wrong while claiming your God given right to walk around your own house naked! Chuckle. Then eye roll.

Try as I might to have only compassion in my heart for all patients… Lord knows I’m only human. And every now and then my eyes must roll or my sanity surely will.