Thanks for the story. I was in the hospital yesterday for unfortunate reasons and it stuck in my mind that working in healthcare is one of the few sectors that feels worth spending one's productive years in (to me).
There's a lot of burnt out healthcare workers for sure, it's a hard job but I would say it's always interesting, you're always learning, there's lots of diversity and ways to specialize your career path (I went into oncology research) and it truly is rewarding. Just keep your head up for flying projectiles at your face :P
Hope you're feeling better!
My mum is a nurse and so I’ve heard a lot of stories of this being common - as if being physically abused is a part of the job.
What happened next? Does a patient get tossed for that? Are criminal charges brought? Did you test for any STI?
Your perspective on life is fantastic. Cheers.
I pounded on the ambulance partition to my partner up front, hollered, "STOP THE GODDAMN RIG!!!!" while I grabbed a bottle of normal saline from the back, jumped out on the side of the highway and rinsed off my face like a crazy woman. The patient was like, "teehee, I'm a bad boy" and I took over driving and my male partner sat with him in the back.
We filled out an incident report form, I had some more thorough rinsing at the ER by submerging my face in cups and talked with the docs to find out you can't really fortunately get many STDs from that other than like... a stye. So I was all good although I think I got tested to be sure.
Patient got a big note in the FRONT of his chart and wasn't ever again attended by female staff.
I don't think charges were worth it to be filed for serial assaulters like that, a lot of people who live in long term care facilities are demented and have no assets so not sure exactly what they would do other than just transfer them around in the system or keep them drugged up/snowed so they don't assault people, I'm not sure. At that time I was only prehospital so we didn't get a lot of case followup on patients!