QUALITY HEALTHCARE- A SATIRE

(A private conversation with myself, one part of me a patient the other a nurse, yes, a split personality if you want to call it that)

When one is in a hospital, private or public, you see them walk about in green, blue, pink and white and all the shades in between. From cradle to grave and all the shit in between they are apparently there to serve those who are in need of nursing care. “What! Shit in between? ………Apparently?........... How dare you speak like that of a noble profession? Do you know what we go through every day? Who are you to judge us? What are your qualifications? If you know nothing about healthcare… don’t talk like this lah” said the nurse.

Well, I am a qualified patient, yes I was sick, I am sick and plan to be sick in the future, and so I do qualify to comment don’t I? I said. “Ok lah! You old man what is your problem?” Well, nurse I didn’t to come to the hospital today on a wheelchair just to piss you off. “Ok, you have a problem pissing. Ok, go to counter 20 for your blood test first” she said before I could tell her my real problem she got the nurse aide to hurriedly push me to counter 20 and left me there.

I don’t know! This is getting complicated; I said to myself, me and my sense of wit, damn, that really didn’t help!

Self propelled, I roll to the counter the last few feet and I see the nurse chewing gum and purposely not noticing me and my sneaky wheel chair. “Excuse me nurse would you help me?” maybe she didn’t hear me, so I repeated it loudly; she ignored again and didn’t even look up. I know I was heard because over a hundred other patients heard me. A while later grudgingly she stretched her hand out for my file, never once looking at me, seemingly busy with other things. “Nurse would you please put me ahead of the queue to have my blood drawn because I’m a sick old man”. “You think you only sick old man ah! Got so many others also they come early one” she said in Manglish.

At that moment I wanted to standup and smack her across her face, but having just one leg made that just a fantasy, well, and it was fun while it lasted.

Two hours later my blood was taken and by then I really did have a pissing problem and to the toilet I went, as usual I hobbled into the toilet par excellence, water, water every where and stinking like ‘nobody’s business’. Well, I must confess that I made a bigger mess of it before I left. Try standing on one leg, with one hand holding ‘you know what’ aiming at the toilet bowl. Why didn’t I sit you say? Well, you should have seen the toilet seat. Apparently the contractor for cleaning the toilet was holidaying in Bahamas with his dirty toilet money.

So I questioned the nurse within myself ….What is nursing care? What is quality nursing care. Is intelligence and hard work alone enough? With tears rolling from my eyes she replied, “You see nurses in this country are never respected no matter what they do. There is a hierarchy built into the system. We get orders from the top and have to carry it out, and if we protest we are put in the freezer or was it cold storage, I’m stressed, I can’t remember now, because the thought of going against the top may result in me being transferred to a remote part of Manglishia. So that is why lah!” she said, wiping the tears from my face. “We do not have the ownership of our own profession”. Stop right there young lady! I said, earlier you spoke in Manglish and now in almost my standard of English, how did that happen? I questioned. “Well, we just act stupid lah, it helps me keep my job and then the patients also think we are stupid one, so they fed up and stop asking us so many questions. But we don’t compromise on the treatment and nursing care, but some got lah with bad attitude like every where else.” she confided.

But I am really sorry to have treated you that way, ‘care’ should be the operative word in nursing and that has to come from the heart where love resides. I will, from now be more thoughtful and caring and by the way we have some good news, your leg is healing well and the bad news is we are very sorry for amputating the wrong leg.

What the @#$%!