Nurses are the real heroes over Christmas

I’ve had mixed feelings about Christmas this year…

On the happy side, it was mine and Matt’s first Christmas together!! Like proper grown-ups! We both worked on Christmas Day so we decided that Christmas dinner/supper is going to be chicken and chips (home-made of course to mark the special occasion), followed by a share tub of Ben & Jerrys (is there such a thing as a share tub?) and a few glasses of fizzy stuff! We both worked on boxing day too so we daren’t indulge too much. 

On the ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ side, on the Christmas rota it would appear that I’m working almost every shift with Jo. Cos it’s Christmas, it’s a pretty scant rota and Steve is helping us all out by working as a nurse, rather than in his usual Charge Nurse role, but he’s basically having Christmas off and working New Year….happy days…not!

Jo is furious with me after I arranged for a dying patient to have one last Christmas. We received a huge hamper of chocolate from her daughter as a thank you and everyone is still talking about what a lovely thing it was to do.

Not Jo though. She’s looking for a single reason to be able to prove that what I did was wrong. So far, we’ve had a call to check with the NMC that we’re allowed to arrange social events for patients. I think they now think she’s bonkers. Then we had her theory that I was only doing it because I was going out with her grandson – he’s 9 – and her latest clutching at straws attempt is suggesting that I am due to receive something in the lady’s will!

It’s not stopping her from eating her body weight in treats from the chocolate hamper though...

 In the end, I think even Steve had heard enough and he took her into the office for one of his quiet words. She came out looking a couple of inches shorter so I figure he wound her neck in for her!

To be fair to her, she’s like a dog with a bone and she does not give in. She’s now back onto her failsafe rumour of me and Steve having a steamy affair, only this time she’s added an extra twist and apparently, we’re working all the bank holidays between us to fund a secret weekend away in the New Year. It’s that secret -  neither of us know about it.

Everyone is starting to notice how she’s constantly having a go at me, which is a good thing. It means that when I finally snap and tie her into one of the empty beds using only my ninja style hospital corners, there will be enough witnesses present in my disciplinary to state how she pushed me to the edge.

I’ve been trying to find out a bit more about her, just to see what possible reason she could have for being such a poisonous individual. Matt said that she clearly has something going on in her life that is affecting her and suggested that I try to cut her a bit of slack. If it had been anyone else saying that, I might have drop-kicked them but Matt can do (and say) no wrong at the moment in my eyes. I know that’s likely to change before New Year strikes but for now I’m enjoying the fuzziness of the honeymoon period.

So, I’m cutting her that slack (for now) and trying to tolerate her sniping and griping. I’m also trying to find out what’s making her so horrid. Don’t get me wrong, whatever the tragedy is, we will never be bosom buddies.

I’ve been like ‘Vera’ this week; asking subtle questions and pretending to be stupid in my bid to get to the bottom of this mystery of poison. I started with the support workers who Jo seems to be friendly with. They were happy to talk to me whilst stuffing their faces with Cadbury’s finest. I didn’t learn much – apparently, she lives with a copper in a lovely house on a new development. They’ve been engaged forever but no one’s sure what’s happening about an actual wedding.

Then I spoke to Carla, one of the other nurses who trained with Jo. She let it slip that Jo goes through phases of fixation, where she becomes obsessed with things to the point of over-kill. She said that when they were students, she became totally fixated with one of their tutors. Carla looked a bit green when she was telling me, and recalled a proper smelly old man with a comb over, white socks and brown leather sandals. She said Jo would go all doe-eyed when he shuffled into the room and would doodle love hearts and arrows all over her notes. Anyway, it all came to a head when she burst into his office one day to declare her love and his wife had popped in to bring his lunch – rumour had it that Jo just couldn’t compete with her bushy eyebrows and furry leg hair and her heart was broken.

And then last year, she’d seen that weird body-building woman on the TV and decided that she was going to be just like her. Carla said Jo had turned up to work one day having decided the first step was to perfect the tan before she tackled the muscles. Apparently one of the patients said she looked like an oompa loompa and asked her if she had a golden ticket!!! After a few months of eating (and smelling like) tuna, Jo had turned her obsession to something else.

Learning all of this made me feel a bit better – all I had to do was wait for her to find something, or someone else to fixate on and normal service would be resumed.

I went home and told Matt all about her over a shared kebab (it must be love if I’m sharing my food) and he seemed quite pleased that I’d thought about getting to know her so that I could try to understand her. That was yesterday.

Today I’ve been called into Steve’s office. Apparently one of the directors has received an anonymous concern about a nurse on the ward who has been giving special treatment to patients and receiving gifts from family members. I won’t lie – I was livid. No prizes for guessing who made that complaint then!

The cheeky biatch has eaten the bloody evidence herself and then tried to drop me in it.

Well Christmas or no Christmas, she’s gone too far this time! A full investigation has now got to take place and I’m going to make sure she tells the truth – even if I’ve got to shake the Cadbury flavoured truth out of her.

I hope everyone has a Happy New Year!