Yesterday morning when I came into work, the guys were laughing about something playing on one of their cell phones. Being that I work with some um, “colorful personalities”, it literally could have been anything playing on that little screen and heck yea I was interested in seeing what it was they were busting a gut over.
The video, surprisingly related to EMS for that setting, was one of those videos made with the lego characters entitled “Firefighter Vs. Nursing Home” and I immediately related to it. The setting is supposed to be a nursing home, the “firefighter” in the video is supposed to be a paramedic or EMT, and it’s as funny as it is sad. It’s funny because you hear the “nurse” talking in the video and she’s saying things that you’ve heard from every nursing home you’ve ever been in. I mean, this could have been the “nursing” home up the street from me, or one of the myriad up the street from me in my other job, or any one of the ones in any place I’ve ever worked.
Let me know if you’ve heard these phrases:
“I just came on shift”, “She’s not my patient”, “She’s altered”, “I don’t know her history”.
If you’ve been in EMS for like, 5 minutes and have been to ONE “Nursing Home”, you’ve heard these phrases. It’s like there’s a nursing home handbook that every person that works in one has to read to get the phrases that they’re supposed to use with EMS providers… Really it’s uncanny how similar this is to hundreds of interactions I’ve had with nursing home staff.
I’ve embedded the video below here… and I have to put some warnings on here. First of all: There is some blue language, including a few utterances of the grand poobah of swear words. There’s also a reference or two to an “adult situation”, and obviously the person who made this (and I don’t know who it was, it was not me) was expressing huge amounts of frustration with his or her own interactions with “nursing” home staff. So if you don’t want to hear swear words, sassy-talk, and a reference to an adult situation, don’t watch it.
Oh, if you’re a nursing home nurse, or a CNA, or anyone who has worked in a nursing home, or has a friend who’s worked in a nursing home, or has someone who might work in a nursing home that you might be friends with and you’re mad at me for putting this up there… here’s my stock reply:
“Not everyone who works in every nursing home is a bad person, it just seems that way sometimes”
“Some of y’all are actually almost human beings”
and…
“I sure would NOT want to do your job, I couldn’t… ever… so Thank God for you if you care and you’re good at what you do.”