Grief vs. Nurse Jenny

They say love is blind.

Grief is just an expression of love, and it can be just as blind. When people grieve, there are many ways it can manifest itself. In this case, it manifested as a desperate need to find someone to blame in an attempt to explain something that doesn't make sense to the person grieving.

A while back, nurse Jenny had a patient suddenly go into cardiac arrest. We (the nurses) weren't really surprised because he was very sick, and we had been seeing signs he was declining rapidly for a couple days. But the family wasn't expecting it at all, despite us trying to prepare them. The patient had an active plan for some imaging and tests, so we were treating him like he was supposed go on living. However, he was no CPR, so when he coded, we couldn't do anything. He was in his early 80s. His wife wailed and screamed in agony like I had never seen before. She cradled his head and shook it gently like she was trying to wake him up. It was breaking all of our hearts, but we gave her space.

I was sitting outside the room when I noticed a family member fast-walking towards the room with a distraught but angry look on his face. He rushed in to hold the patient's wife, and I closed the door behind them to give them privacy. Suddenly, he burst out of the room and screamed down the hall, "What did you give him?!" before ducking back in. I'm sure the entire unit heard him he screamed so loud. I walked to the doorway, and before I could say anything, he continued. "You guys killed him! You gave him too much of this!" He pointed at the word Remeron we had written on the whiteboard. I quietly asked him to calm down, flustered by the sudden eruption. "No! You killed him! He was fine yesterday! We never should have come to the hospital! You guys just kill people!" He was screaming at the top of his lungs, holding nothing back.

I turned around to see Jenny approaching, looking distraught as she prepared herself for what she knew was coming. She entered the room and sure enough, the man screamed at her, "What did you give him?!" She explained that she had actually held all non-essential medications that night because he was too out of it and lethargic to safely take pills and had low blood pressures. The man didn't believe her for a second. She even offered to show him the patient's medication record to prove he wasn't given anything overnight. "I don't care what the computer says! You did this! What kind of a nurse are you? You killed him!"

I had gotten the charge nurse by now and she took Jenny out of the room and advised her not to go in again. Moments later, I found her crying in the hall and gave her a hug. She was crushed to hear the man saying she killed the patient, even though she knew she literally hadn't done anything but actually practiced safe judgment. The charge nurse let her go home early.

I grappled with this incident for a while, unsure how to find a balance between understanding the power of grief and not understanding abusing a caregiver like that. I felt so bad for Jenny, too. At the time, I was still a pretty young nurse, and I think if a patient screamed at me like that, I'd have had a hard time getting over it. Of course, over the years I've learned to take what patients and family members do and say out of grief or fear with a grain of salt. When experiencing a devastating and unexpected loss, it's natural for humans to look for an explanation, even one that is unreasonable. Unfortunately, in a career that so often sees loss, death, and grief, lashing out is relatively common. My hospital has a code system to call when a patient or family member is escalating their behavior. How many other types of workplaces have full teams and specialists dedicated specifically to that? Not many.

Moral of the story: Healthcare consistently ranks as the industry that sees the highest rate of workplace aggression and violence for a reason. Grief changes people, so it is always important that there is a system in place meant to control it. This is one of the many reasons being a healthcare professional isn't for everybody, but I love my job all the same because I love when I can help people and make a difference, which far outweighs how often I'm screamed at, spat on, kicked, or scratched.

• Bella, RN