Lately, I have been swooning. In the real sense of the word. I fainted. Twice in as many days.
Never having fainted in my life before, and in the absence of having just met Johnny Depp or being told by Mister Darcy that he ardently admires me, I decided this was a habit in need of further investigation.
So I went to a Victorian public hospital. Wow.
Turns out, there's a nursing dispute. Turns out, Victorian nurses are paid less than any other nurses in the country. Significantly. Which is no wonder. They barely do anything to help the community. Check it out, here are some edited highlights of what went down during the thirteen hours I was in emergency at the hospital:
1. Two hallucinating, violent, screaming, presumably ice-affected patients had to be subdued. Their abusive, terrifying screams could be heard throughout the corridors. The staff looked exhausted.
2. An elderly man with renal failure and a tumour sat alone waiting until his tummy was empty enough for further tests. He was looked after by a nurse who had to excuse himself several times because nobody else was available to resuscitate other patients. Despite this, he and the old man had a few in-jokes by the end of the night and I felt less bad for him being there alone.
3. A woman who had chased her attacker down a dark alleyway was being followed everywhere by two policewomen who asked questions about what kind of needle her attacker used to stab her with. The woman was worried, shaking, and also possibly a little bit stoned. When describing chasing the man down the street, she got the giggles. My boyfriend is going to think I'm such an idiot, she said.
4. A student whose mother had flown over from China to support her during her exams was desperate for something for her tonsilitis. She was already on antibiotics. It needs to go away, she explained, because of my exams. She had waited for nine hours to see a doctor. She was so stressed she couldn't sit down.
5. A guy had fallen up the stairs with a broken leg in a cast. He described it as excruciatingly painful. The male nurse had to shave him in order to access the leg. It was embarrassing, so the nurse offered to shave a smiley face and the patient said he'd probably prefer Batman. The nurse had to rush off to find a heart monitor, but he agreed that the patient was definitely a batman kind of guy.
6. A woman, disembarking a tram, had broken her foot. Her friend, who there to support her and who was studying law, read about the Nuremberg trials in the waiting room. A woman with kidney problems groaned. Nuremberg "puts things in perspective", said the law girl, unconvincingly.
7. At almost six in the morning, a girl who has been moaning in pain has to face up to a needle. The nurse gets her to relax. Genuinely terrified, she begs him not to inject her. He talks her down. She relaxes. She feels better. He changes shifts, informing the next nurse of every single detail of the patients in their care.
8. Back in the waiting room, when I was looking worse, the triage nurse brought me a glass of milk and a pain killer and tucked my hair behind my ear. She apologised for the wait and told me how far up the queue I was. She was verbally abused by several people. She was wearing a badge saying Fund Nursing Properly.
Today, after sleeping off the night I had without sleep the night before, I wrote a letter to my local member, the health minister, and the Premier. Victorian nurses are the lowest paid in the country. The nurse I mention here has a three year postgrad degree and is paid less than a first year nurse in NSW who has never been in a hospital. Without proper ratios and incentives for nurses, hospitals will have to run like the one I was at the other night - in total lock-down, no ambulances allowed in, with people being treated in chairs, in areas not designated for treatment.
People who are sick are desperate, sometimes angry, sometimes terrified, sometimes weeping, sometimes violent. Nurses are doing real work with real consequences and from my brief window into the system today, they're doing it bloody well.
Of course, if I had the money or the inclination, I could have paid a whole lot of money and gone to a private hospital, where I would have been out in mere hours, rather than an entire night. Because that makes sense.
If you care, go here.
If you work at St Vincent's, thank you.