wearing out our welcome

mark my words, we are going to get kicked off of our new floor.

it all started after our 'big move' d/t construction on the old unit.  suddenly for the first time since i've been a nurse, we have neighbors!!  this is nice in the way that it conveniences me when i need a green top or a vial of metoprolol, but strange in that i can't tell which patients belong to us and which are just passing through.  and then there's the whole matter of our unit showing its true colors...

we are hood.  and now everyone knows it.

it started innocently enough, in a baby momma fight that involved weave getting ripped out in the middle of our shared hallway and the screaming of the phrase "stupid ho" loud enough to make the nurses on the other unit come running.  the sheriff showed up and hauled people off to jail, and that was that.

then a week later security showed up looking for some visitors.  when trying to find teenagers who steal food from the cafeteria, apparently our unit is first on the list of places to look.  and sure enough, there they were.  after getting lectured by security and having someone pay for the food, the kids were of course very apologetic and saw the error of their ways.  just kidding.  they actually went back to the cafeteria and threatened the workers who turned them in, leading the sheriff to pay our unit another visit.

a few days later, we had a gentleman who thought it was acceptable to grope at the nursing assistants and call them "baby".  a manager tried to talk to the patient and explain that this was inappropriate behavior, which didn't go over too well.  things ended with the patient chasing our manager down the hallway in his wheelchair and calling him a homosexual.  cue the sheriff.

and a few days after that, one of my coworkers was asked to put his patient's coat away.  he opened the closet in the room only to find a samurai sword.  yes, a samurai sword.  when the sheriff showed up (for the fourth time in two weeks, but who's counting?), the patient was also found to have a hoard of oxycodone and his urine came back positive for cocaine.

these things happen in the land of trauma drama, but not usually so frequently and never so publicly.  but now here we are, on display for the rest of the hospital to see.  i'm half glad that other nurses can see what we're dealing with while they're taking care of normal looking people, and half embarrassed to be "that floor".

thankfully it will only be a few months until we move back to our own unit, tucked away in a corner by ourselves for reasons that i now see very clearly.  and it's my hope that these few weeks of lawlessness will reinforce to 'the man' that we really do need the locked unit we've been begging for.

but until then, new neighbors, my apologies.