Another reason I hate my job

So I had this patient. Nice guy, Spanish speaking only, didn't laugh at my Spanish like the Puerto Rican patients I have. I learned my Spanish from Mexicans so the accent I have may be a little bit not what the Puerto Ricans are used to. Anyways, that's not really the point of this story. The point of my story is that, when I'm trying to be a good person and a caring doctor, that seems to be the time that I often get shit for going out of my way to help another human being as a fellow human being.

So this patient had a stroke, left side paralyzed. He had a bedside commode but a nurse across the hall stole it for one of her patients. And my patient really had to drop #2. So the nurse in the stroke unit is trying to tell me to let it slide, that she'll clean it up. And I don't get this, but for some reason, only myself and the patient seem to grasp that it's not a good thing to poo yourself if you can at all avoid it. I ask the nurse to try and help me get the patient to the bathroom but she won't have it saying that I never put in an order for that level of activity.

So what else could I do, I picked up the patient myself and carried him to the shitter. The nurse of course gets pissed off at me about liability issues or some such crap. The patient is really thankful, except that I have to hang out with him while he drops off the kids at the pool. I mean, I really do want to the guy to be safe, but still I have to take all this flak from the nurse about how I could hurt myself and the patient doing what I did and how inappropriate it is to carry a guy to the john.

I don't know. Maybe it was wrong. But it's what I would want if I was a patient. Just a little bit of compassion. Anyways, in the end I got the patient back to bed and later on I brought the nurse some pie to cool everything out. Nurses love pie.

And I didn't tell anyone but the nurse was right, my back hurt like hell for the next couple of days because I did that. The guy was not a small guy. Whatever. Like I'm going to hold someone liable for my own idiocy.

I'm just trying to do a good job. And in the end I get so little respect.