Текст книги "The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital"

Автор книги: Alexandra Robbins

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

LARA

  SOUTH GENERAL HOSPITAL, September

Lara sprinted on a treadmill at the gym, sweat dripping off of her chiseled abs. I want my mom, Lara thought, pushing herself to run faster. I do not want the drugs.

Since the day at South General when she’d nearly taken the vial of Dilaudid, Lara had attended more than her usual thrice-weekly NA meetings to bolster her support. She had increased her interactions with her sponsor and sponsees, all of whom were looking out for her. And she went to the gym as often as she could. She knew full well that she had replaced her painkiller addiction with an exercise addiction. She went to the gym every day for boot camp and spin classes. At home, she religiously exercised to Beachbody Insanity DVDs, a hard-core cardio workout.

She rationalized that exercise was an acceptable outlet which, unlike the drugs, wouldn’t kill her. Besides, it helped. “I think too much about the bad stuff I see: children who have died, a teenager who died in a motorcycle accident. I can’t help thinking about their parents’ faces,” Lara said. Exercising “helps me release some of that negative energy. It allows me to think about it without breaking down and becoming incapacitated. Before, I wasn’t facing things going on. Drugs helped me to stuff it down more. Exercise helps me process it.”

She had been able to put down the Dilaudid in August because she reminded herself how painful withdrawal had been. She had suffered through weeks of sleeplessness, night sweats, diarrhea, vomiting, and terrible nausea. “The withdrawal from narcotics is a living hell. I felt like my skin was crawling. All you want to do is sleep and you can’t. That’s why you hear about heroin addicts who can’t get clean. It’s because they’re like, ‘I know what will make this go away for just a little bit,’ ” Lara said. “I do not ever want to go through that again. Could you imagine feeling like that and having to take care of your kids?”

When she got to work after the gym, a loud drunk woman came into the ER shouting vulgarities. “That motherfucker!” she screamed. “My brother’s going to cut his dick off and shove it up his ass!” She was so out of control that the nurses couldn’t calm her down.

Lara took report from the medics. The woman claimed that someone followed her home from a party and raped and sodomized her. Unfortunately, she had showered afterward, which likely washed away much of the evidence for her case. While she waited for South General’s designated sexual assault nurse to arrive, Lara had nowhere to put the woman but the lobby.

Patients in the waiting room were loudly gossiping about the woman, whom they assumed was a typical ER drunk. “What’s her problem?” they complained. “Just let her go home,” a security guard muttered. Gradually, patients yelled back at her directly: “Shut the fuck up!”

Lara couldn’t tell them not to judge. And she didn’t want the woman to go home; she wanted her to get the help she needed. She brought the woman back to triage with her, depositing her in a room where nurses did blood work and EKGs. The waiting patients were angry at Lara for not sending the still-ranting woman home and the woman was angry because she said it hurt too much to sit down. Lara tried to ignore the glares coming at her from all directions, reminding herself repeatedly, This is not about me. She didn’t know why, but she believed the woman.

At first, Lara had been slightly nervous to work at South General, where violence, including murder and rape, touched many patients’ lives. Now, South General was her favorite hospital. While some patients had been initially leery of the curly-haired blonde nurse assigned to them, they soon changed their minds. “Once they lose their attitude against me, they see I’m there to help them and we build a rapport,” Lara said. “I respect them, I’m taking care of them, I’m not judging them. I can give them a pillow or blanket or five minutes of my time to really listen, and they’re grateful. Sometimes I’ll even get a hug from a patient after they’re discharged.” That didn’t happen elsewhere.

Lara also liked working with her colleagues, despite racial tensions that separated the black nurses from the few white nurses. She was the only white nurse whom many of the black nurses treated the same way they treated each other. A veteran ER nurse named Rose, in particular, had gone out of her way to welcome Lara since she had first arrived at South General. Rose was a sweet woman with no edges. If any nurse needed help of any kind, Rose was there for her without hesitation. She kept an eye on her coworkers so that if one of them was struggling with her patient load, Rose would step in, offering to take a patient for a CT scan or an admitted patient upstairs. She was a true team player.

When the sexual assault nurse finally arrived to evaluate the still-ranting patient, she spent more than an hour examining the woman. Afterward, she told Lara she was right to keep her in the ER. The woman’s injuries corroborated her story.

Lara was a self-assured nurse, skilled and experienced. She’d been confident ever since she had made the correct call on her own child. When Lindsey was four months old, Lara happened to be taking a pediatric advanced life-support class. She was reviewing her textbook in bed and decided to quiz her husband. “Hey, John, what would you do if one of our kids was choking and I wasn’t home?” she asked.

He answered correctly. “And where would you take a pulse on a baby?”

John didn’t know that one.

Lara went to Lindsey in her crib and pressed her fingers on her upper arm. She counted. “Sixty?” she said. “That can’t be right.” She did it again. “Oh my God, her heart rate is sixty and it should be one-forty!” She ran to the book to show John the page. “It shouldn’t be sixty! Something’s wrong!”

“You’re overreacting. Lindsey’s fine,” her husband said.

The next day, she took her daughter to the pediatrician, who said that Lindsey’s heart rate was normal. “Umm, maybe she has a cold,” the doctor said.

“What does having a cold have to do with her heart?” Lara asked. There was no reply.

Unsatisfied, Lara made an appointment with a cardiologist. The morning of the appointment, Lara weighed whether to cancel it. “I feel like the freaky know-it-all mom. I don’t want to go there and have them look at me like I’m crazy,” she told her husband.

“You might as well keep the appointment since you made it.”

At the cardiologist’s office, even before Lindsey’s EKG results had finished printing, the doctor told Lara, “Your daughter is in heart block and needs a pacemaker this week.” Heart block referred to a dangerously slow heart rate because the electrical signals that caused the heart to contract were partially or totally blocked. Lindsey had a pacemaker inserted during open heart surgery. Two months later, she went into complete heart block, saved only by the pacemaker. The cardiologist told Lara that if she hadn’t detected the problem, Lindsey “would have been one of those babies who was put to bed one night and didn’t wake up.”

Lindsey, who still had the pacemaker, was now a healthy 5-year-old. The experience bolstered Lara’s faith that she was “supposed” to be a nurse. Between the pacemaker and Lara’s addiction recovery, “Weird things have happened to me. I look at them as ways to grow,” Lara explained. “I am a stronger, more confident woman now. I tell my patients all the time to listen to their gut. I tell parents who seem self-conscious or unsure, ‘You know your kid better than we do.’ ”

She wished she were as confident in her marriage, but John was making that difficult. His own addictive personality led him to relate to and help her with hers, but dealing with his gambling and cheating—he said he had a sex addiction—added to her stress. He loved her, she knew, but he said he couldn’t curb his behavior. She stayed with him because Lindsey and her 6-year-old brother, Sebastian, were young. Lara and John made a good living together; at least, they had, until he got laid off from the heating and air conditioning company. They led separate lives anyway, with their own interests and friends. “I have a beautiful home, beautiful babies, and a good life, just a ridiculous husband,” she said. “When my mom got sick, I didn’t have time to focus on his stupidity.”

She remembered during her mother’s illness, she was working full-time, taking care of her children, and shuttling back and forth to her mother’s home twice a day. The week she put her mother in hospice care, her husband was cheating on her in Vegas. When Angie, Lara’s former coworker and roommate, asked Lara why she put up with it, Lara had replied, “I don’t have time to focus on John right now. My mom is dying and she is my focus.”

Lara still wasn’t ready to address her marriage. For now, she had plenty of other distractions. She was taking college classes toward her bachelor’s degree, and she was hoping to volunteer once a week as an elementary school nurse to spend more time around her children and their friends. Volunteering was also an outlet to express her gratitude. She said, “I’ve messed up so much in my life, and this is a way to give back. I made a lot of mistakes and God kind of let me off.”

JULIETTE

  PINES MEMORIAL, September

While Priscilla, Charlene, and Erica managed the ER nursing staff, in that order, rarely did all three work the same shift. The day’s supervisor directly affected Juliette’s workload: Priscilla and Erica were fair, Charlene was not. Juliette wished her work life weren’t so tied up in her feelings about her coworkers, but nursing was a deeply interpersonal profession in which people had to depend on others—doctors, techs, fellow nurses—to do their job well.

Erica made Juliette want to be a better nurse. As senior charge nurse, she advocated for fellow nurses: If a doctor talked down to a nurse, Erica would march up to him or her and announce, “You can’t talk to my nurse that way.” She was a good charge nurse, a good manager, and a good teacher; she had taught Juliette how to be a good charge nurse, too.

Juliette was eager to please her supervisors because positive reinforcement inspired her to work harder, perform better, learn more. At Avenue Hospital, the ER director had made clear that she appreciated Juliette. Every few months, she emailed Juliette a positive message: “The charge nurse told me what a great job you did last night” or “We’re so happy you’re part of our staff.”

At Pines, Juliette had been dismayed to learn that Priscilla, the nursing director, was a member of the exclusive nurse clique (and that Charlene thought she was part of it, too). Juliette cared so much what her manager thought of her that she shared personal secrets with Priscilla, wanting her to understand everything she could possibly need to know about her. That way, like the Avenue director, Priscilla could encourage her to be the best nurse she could be. Priscilla appeared supportive of Juliette and had a good rapport with several of the nurses. Juliette had made an extra effort to show Priscilla that she was a hard worker, hoping to get the same positive reinforcement that she had received at Avenue. She was still waiting for it.

On a warm September morning, Juliette walked into the building thinking, as usual, Please don’t be Charlene, please don’t be Charlene.

It was Erica. “Yay! Erica, I’m so glad to see you!” Juliette exclaimed.

“I’m glad you’re here, too!” Erica said. “We’re staffed well today. Where do you want to be, with Mimi?”

Erica assigned her to a zone with Juliette’s favorite tech, Mimi. A good tech could make an enormous difference to nurses; procedures went smoothly and nurses could use their time more efficiently. Mimi, a Filipina woman in her forties, was a conscientious tech who had been at Pines for twenty years. Mimi would do whatever a nurse needed without hesitation. It wasn’t uncommon for techs to stand around reading magazines when new patients were wheeled in, despite knowing that when a patient with chest pain arrived, for example, he needed an IV, EKG, and a monitor. Nurses had to ask most of Pines’ techs to do each task. They didn’t have to ask Mimi for anything.

When a patient arrived in the ER with mild chest pain, Mimi ran an EKG. The patient had been waiting awhile. He was 55, the pain was on his left side, and he was sweating. Juliette made an executive decision to test his troponin levels, which could indicate damage to the heart muscle. At Pines, nurses were allowed to run advanced treatment protocols like this without waiting for doctor’s orders, if the doctor hadn’t yet seen the patient.

When Dr. Preston came in, he reviewed the patient’s chart. “I wish you hadn’t run troponins on him. His EKG didn’t show any changes.”

Clark Preston was an efficient doctor. He didn’t order more tests than necessary. He decided quickly on a patient’s diagnosis, then focused his testing on that diagnosis rather than conducting a broad spectrum of tests to make sure. This was easier on the nurses, who knew that his diagnoses were likely to be correct. But the nurses, who looked out for him because he was fun to work with, still worried that sometimes he was too brazen, too quick to assess. So far, he had not been sued. In this case, he wanted to examine the patient before running cardiac labs. Based on the EKG and the patient description of the pain, the problem could have been GI-related.

Forty-five minutes later, the lab called Juliette. She found Dr. Preston in the doctors’ back office. “Troponins came back positive,” she told him. The patient likely was having a heart attack and required further cardiac evaluation.

Dr. Preston leaned back in his chair, palms up, content to give Juliette credit. “Well,” he said with a disarming grin, “I’d rather be proven wrong than have to explain a dead guy.”

Juliette laughed, and went to administer the patient’s cardiac medications and reassess his pain and vital signs.

Midshift, Erica switched Juliette to triage to help improve patient flow. Knowledgeable, experienced nurses were more efficient at getting patients the right care. Soon afterward, someone from the Employee Health Department wheeled in a young, red-haired woman who was weeping uncontrollably. Juliette recognized her right away; she was a secretary who worked in the ICU. When they were alone, Juliette asked her name, per protocol.

“Nancy. You know who I am.”

Juliette smiled compassionately. “What brings you to the ER today?”

Between sobs, Nancy said, “I’m stressed and I can’t work and it’s horrible up there and I just can’t take it anymore!”

Juliette handed her some tissues. “What’s going on?”

“I’m . . . having . . . boy problems,” she said through gasping breaths.

Gradually, Juliette coaxed out the story. Nancy’s boy problem was that for nearly a year she had been dating Dr. Fontaine, a sexy charmer who worked in the ICU. That morning, Nancy had learned that Dr. Fontaine was also dating three nurses at Pines, and one of them was pregnant with his child. The pregnant nurse had told Nancy in person. Nancy was heartbroken. She couldn’t eat.

As Juliette triaged her, diagnosing anxiety and a panic attack, she offered what consolation she could. “I am so sorry this happened,” Juliette said. “Try to relax and we will take care of you. We’ll get you a private room in the back so you don’t have to see anybody.” Juliette was glad that the ER doctor that day was sympathetic. The doctor gave Nancy antianxiety medication and discharged her.

Juliette would never be able to look at Dr. Fontaine the same way. Nurses liked him because he was friendly and didn’t order too many ER tests per patient. The ER nurses’ goal for ICU patients was to get them quickly upstairs, where they could be stabilized and receive proper care. Many specialty doctors asked the ER nurses to do the initial tests, or they ordered extra labs and tests for the sake of ordering them. Dr. Fontaine usually said, “We can do everything upstairs.” Oh, that’s why he didn’t order a lot of tests, Juliette thought. He wanted to get back upstairs to get busy with all of his girls.

The Sexy Nurse: From “Yes, Doctor” to “Ooh Yes, Doctor”

The outdated caricature of the sexy nurse—breasts straining buttons on a form-fitting white minidress, shapely legs slipped into fishnets and white heels—remains pervasive and global. Nurses say it also holds the profession back.

A small (and strange) 2012 study published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing found that of the top-ten media-generated nurse videos on YouTube, six presented nurses as either sexpots or stupid. In a similar vein, on a 2010 Dr. Oz show, several women wearing sexy nurse costumes and red lingerie danced with Dr. Mehmet Oz. This came a few years after nurses objected to Dr. Phil McGraw’s on-air pronouncement that “cute little nurses” are husband hunters. Nurses strongly protested both doctors’ portrayals of the profession.

Imagery that sexualizes nurses can depict hardworking women as frivolous playthings or present a difficult job that requires significant expertise as nothing more than a provocative cartoon. At times, this portrayal has slipped into the province of actual medical care. Near a Las Vegas diner, where waitresses dressed as sexy nurses push customers to their cars in wheelchairs, a real medical assistant at an actual medical IV therapy practice wears a sexy nurse costume with white fishnets as she ministers to patients. In England, a bus company advertised its route to a hospital by adorning buses with a giant picture of a sexy nurse in a skimpy, figure-clinging dress, captioned, “Ooooh, matron!” Not only was the ad disparaging, but it also implied that patients need only step on board to be transported to the healthcare provider of their fantasies; the ad seemed to beckon, “This way to hot, nursey sex.”

Some hospitals aren’t above spinning the stereotype, either. A Swedish hospital recruiting nurses to work during the summer of 2012 posted an Internet ad that instructed, “You will be motivated, professional, and have a sense of humour. And of course, you will be TV series-hot. . . . Throw in a nurse’s education and you are welcome to seek a summer job at SÖdersjukhuset’s emergency department.” The hospital, which has the largest Emergency Care Unit in the Nordic region, completely trivialized nurses’ qualifications, tossing in a nursing degree as if it were an afterthought.

Nurses laugh at the idea that their job is TV-series sexy. Instead of come-hither white dresses, today’s nurses wear scrubs that might be stained with blood, urine, or various other un-arousing substances. A male nurse in Virginia said, “We’re sweaty and smelly and covered in germs. Plus, we’ve all had patients die in horrible ways in pretty much every corner of the building. I would never be able to get it on in a hospital.” Similarly, former certified nursing assistant Erin Gloria Ryan, news editor of the popular women’s issues blog Jezebel, remarked on a nurse-related comment thread, “Nothing sexier than someone who is going to record the frequency and consistency of your bowel movements on a chart.”

As a Michigan nurse manager pointed out, “Some nurses do fit the naughty nurse persona.” And some nurses are often happy to engage in tongue-in-cheek innuendo (or worse; see Chapter 5). But sometimes the sexy nurse seeps into the public consciousness as more than just a joke. Nurses told me about doctors groping them. An Oregon nurse said, “Some of the docs are lecherous old perverts.” Gail Adams, head of one of the United Kingdom’s largest unions, has noted, “People are happy to sexualize the image of nursing but are then surprised when nurses are attacked or have lewd or indecent comments made towards them.”

In 2010, a Dutch nurse union received complaints that male patients were requesting sex and some nurses were complying. Reuters reported that a 24-year-old nursing student told the union that she had seen a 42-year-old disabled man’s home care nurses sexually gratifying him. The man, who had a muscle disorder that let him move only his mouth and eyes, told her that his previous seven nurses had done the same. When the student refused his request, the man tried to fire her, claiming that she was unfit for the job. The incident prompted one newscaster to remark, “I’ve got to get myself a nurse in Holland.”

The union launched a campaign reminding the public that sexual services were not part of a nurse’s job description. The campaign, “I Draw the Line Here,” featured a young nurse crossing her hands in front of her face. According to the union, in response to the campaign, the managing director of a patient interest group argued, in all seriousness, that patients “are free to ask. You are free to refuse.”

For now, let’s set aside the idea of happy-ending healthcare and tell it like it is. Like men and women in any other profession, nurses have sex. And yes, many of them boff their colleagues. In an unscientific poll for the purpose of this book, I asked more than 100 nurses whether they or any of the nurses they worked with had engaged in a sexual relationship with a doctor, nurse, or other coworker. Eighty-seven percent of them said yes.

Depending on the hospital and the unit, a nurse’s relationship landscape can range from “I feel like I’m actually living Grey’s Anatomy” (Washington State) to “Hospital life is so damn far from Grey’s Anatomy, it’s not even funny. Our doctors aren’t that hot, supply closets almost always have two doors and they never lock from the inside. And no one has time to go make out with a doctor anyway, because we’re usually behind in charting, haven’t peed in nine hours, and are fighting hypoglycemia on a constant basis because we don’t get the time to eat” (Colorado).

Nurses describe affairs with married doctors, trysts with residents, techs, and fellow nurses, and certain units that are more infamous than others. “Some places, everyone is banging each other and it’s an incestuous circle,” said a Delaware nurse. “ERs are notorious. The nurse is hooking up with the medic, who is also seeing the case manager, who just got the physician pregnant. It happens whenever you put young, money-strapped, stressed-out people together for long hours with few breaks.”

It also happens on hospital property. Nurses have gotten intimate in on-call rooms, equipment lockers, storage closets, linen closets, family conference rooms, stairwells, visitor bathrooms, libraries, patient rooms, offices, and parking lots.

Nurses offer several reasons for their coworkers’ allure, beyond what a Washington nurse who slept with a cardiology tech called the “heady” feeling of conducting an illicit relationship in a taboo place. In any situation when people constantly spend long hours together, they are more likely to consider each other potential romantic partners. “Sexual exploits are bound to happen,” said a Virginia nurse practitioner who dated a med student. “When I worked in the ER, there were always residents who’d try to convince younger nurses to join them in the call room at night.”

The medical setting adds an intoxicating variable: Surrounded by reminders of mortality and infused with the adrenaline rush of tackling emergencies, medical professionals can get caught up in the enticement of sex and affairs. A Pennsylvania nurse attributed some of her nursing expertise to a mild flirtation with a resident: “I wanted to be in the same room with him, so I tried to predict what cases he would be attending and ask to be assigned. Those were big cases—partial gastrectomy, abdominal aneurysms, thoracic procedures—and I grew as an OR nurse because of that.”

Nurses said they hook up with coworkers for the same reason they are drawn to police officers and firefighters: They “get it.” Emergency personnel understand what it’s like to save a life, to face a trauma, to try to help, to fail. “It’s like any kind of trauma: Those who survive the experience have memories in common. It’s harder to go home to a spouse who has no idea what the trenches are like,” said an advanced-practice nursing professor in Texas. “When people work under stress, they bond, and sometimes the bonding crosses over to sexual activity.”

Hospitals carry a longtime tradition of nurses marrying doctors. Years ago, when most doctors were male, “residency was all-consuming, so the only women they met were at the hospital,” said a Michigan women’s– health nurse who married a resident. “Every year in June, teaching hospitals distribute pictures of the residents. When I was a young nurse, the pictures would become marked with ‘M’ or ‘S’ for married or single, so we would all know who was available. Of course, now that more women are residents, doctors marry other doctors.”

If colleagues can remain discreet, as in any workplace, are their relationships such a bad thing? “We’ve gone to a quiet stairwell, or outside when it was dark, listening for someone coming,” said an Indiana psychiatric nurse who has dated a security guard and a cafeteria worker at her hospital. “People are able to keep it a secret unless they work directly with one another and act like awkward idiots.”

Or unless they’re caught in the act. At one East Coast hospital, a camera captured a nurse giving oral sex to a surgeon in the library. “They were both reprimanded and the entire hospital staff found out about it, which had to be the most embarrassing thing ever,” said a travel nurse assigned to the hospital. “CCTV is a bad, bad thing for a secret hospital rendezvous.”

As happens anywhere, intimate relationships can strain interactions with coworkers, who may feel they have to take sides, keep secrets, or avoid drama. An Arizona oncology nurse’s coworker dated several doctors in the same hospital. “She became a joke among the docs,” the nurse said. “Everyone in her department lost respect for her. At multiple social events, she showed up clinging to the arm of a different doctor each time. Bad social move, bad career move.”

After a Louisiana oncology nurse accidentally walked in on her preceptor having sex with a doctor, the preceptor criticized the new nurse daily until she drove her out of the job. “Usually, it only causes issues when there’s a breakup or jealousy. It makes it hard to work when they are fighting,” said an Indiana nurse whose unit included two nurses having affairs with three doctors. “We do have fun, but there have been times when it has gone too far. The younger nurses aren’t that discreet and can get distracted by drama. A new nurse had an affair with an older nurse’s husband, a respiratory therapist, and flaunted it. Needless to say, the new nurse found it difficult to work here and transferred.”

The double standard

It takes two (or, in the case of nurses caught having sex in a Scottish hospital’s geriatric ward closet, three), but the nurse commonly suffers more consequences than the doctor. Upon learning that a nurse manager was sleeping with a doctor, Virginia administrators fired the nurse and eventually promoted the doctor, even though the couple got married. When a resident and a nurse were caught having sex in an Eastern Maryland hospital supply closet, the hospital gave the resident a slap on the wrist but fired the nurse.

There is an odd dichotomy by which the public seems to want to sexualize nurses yet keep them from having sex; they can be whorish angels but not angelic whores, nor anything in between. In the U.K., a writer remarked, “As Britons, we are obsessed with the ‘naughtiness’ of nursing.”

When a group of nurses posed in their underwear for a calendar, the U.K.’s Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) threatened to remove them from the register (roughly equivalent to rescinding their licenses). An NMC spokesperson said, “Nurses are expected to uphold the good reputation of their profession at all times. This is clearly stated in your Code of Conduct, and failure to comply may bring your fitness to practice into question.” First, this happened in the same country in which buses advertised a nurse wearing not much more than the calendar models. And second, to expect a nurse to follow an employer’s rules “at all times” is ludicrous. The NMC sounded like college sorority officers, vetting clothing, demanding pages’ worth of arbitrary codes of conduct, and attempting to govern members’ nonsorority activities. Like any other professionals, nurses have independent lives outside of work. Why should a regulatory organization expect to control nurses’ lives when there is no comparable oversight for, say, accountants?

The double standard struck again when radiology staff at another U.K. hospital posed nude for a charity fund-raising calendar: The Nursing Times reported that there were no complaints. And a London hospital knowingly rented out a ward to a company that shot a big-budget pornographic film inside.

Britons do seem to obsess over the topic. Lord Benjamin Mancroft, a Tory peer (similar to a senator), delivered a House of Lords speech in which he complained that nurses at the hospital to which he was admitted were “promiscuous.” (His evidence was that he overheard his nurses chatting about their social lives.) He made this announcement a couple of months after the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence issued “sexual boundaries” guidelines to health professionals, whose failure to comply could result in loss of license. Among other stipulations, the ruling banned doctors and nurses from dating patients.

Nurse-patient sex

Nurse-patient relationships open a new can of controversies. Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic fired a male neurology nurse for “maltreatment of a vulnerable adult” because he had sex with a patient several times in her bathroom. But the Minnesota Health Department subsequently determined that the man had not violated state rules because the relationship was consensual.

One in six U.K. nurses know of a coworker who has had sex with a patient, and one in ten think it is acceptable for nurses to have relationships with patients, according to a Nursing Times survey. A British nurse received a one-year suspension for having a three-month affair with a cystic fibrosis patient after he was discharged from her hospital and despite his returning for a heart and lung transplant. Hardly discreet about it, she joked to coworkers that she had to increase his oxygen and give him a nebulizer inhaler before they had sex.