A six year old patient needed a conscious sedation for a bone reduction. Nice! I’ve done them in the past. I can set up one quickly and fortunately my kiddo has IV access already. All orders are in, I just needed to set the monitors, go get the meds from pharmacy and I’m ready. Once everything is set up my job is to gather the team.

About 20 minutes pass and I’m ready, I tell my pod mates that I’m going to be in a conscious sedation if they could just keep an eye on my other two patients. I checked on them, they’re stable and they don’t need anything at the moment. I go into the room and start calling the team.

For the next 45 minutes I’m calling back and forth between the attending, the resident, ortho and the rad tech. Getting yelled at by all four of them because not a single one of them wanted to be there before the others. The resident got angry at me because I should know better than to call him without the attending present. The attending was upset because ortho should be there already and he wasn’t going to just stand around waiting for everyone to show up. Ortho started yelling at me because how dare I call him before the X-ray machine was in the room. And the rad tech wasn’t brining the x-ray machine if ortho wasn’t there already. This was exhausting. One complaining about the other and taking their frustrations out on me.

I get a call from ortho screaming that he was coming down and if the X-ray machine wasn’t in the room by the time he got there he wasn’t going to do anything. I call the rad tech one more time.

He answers.

Rad tech: “I told you, don’t call me until everyone is there! Are you fucking stupid!?” hangs up

I had it. I could not take the verbal abuse anymore. I create a group chat with all of them and type the following

“Here’s everyone’s extensions

Ortho - 1

Attending - 2

Resident - 3

Rad tech - 4

All of you have yelled at me without any reason to do so, please take your anger out on each other. I am not your punching bag.”

Literally my hands were shaking when I hit sent.

Within five minutes everyone shows up. Tears are coming out of my eyes, my voice is shaky when I do the time out. They start the procedure but you can tell I’m making them uncomfortable because I’m crying. You can hear a pin drop. The mom gets up and gives me the warmest hug ever and I just go off.

I tell her through my tears all I’m trying to do is take care of her child and these so call professionals have berated me like I’ve done something wrong. She’s very understanding and says she heard how each of them screamed at me on the phone. Not a single one of the others say anything. It’s like they were put on blast. The procedure finishes and finally I leave the room after the patient is back to baseline.

I hated how I had to be the middle person between four different people and the way I cracked under pressure in front of a patient. I hated I had to send a message like that to four grown men because they couldn’t talk to each other.

However, the attending did come afterwards and sat down next to me at the nurses’ station and apologized for his behavior. That made me feel a little bit better.

Sorry, rant over. Gosh I feel so much better.