Nurses And Bullying, My Story… Just One Of Many

Nurse Jessica Sites

Every girl I know dreams of having that group of friends in her life that she can lean on no matter what. The way those Sex and the City divas, Samantha and Carrie, and the rest of the gang support each other and motivate each other to be better and take no bullsh*t. Or, that other famous group of gals, the Golden Girls, Dorothy and Blanche, and Rose and Sophia, always ending every conflict with a hug and a big slice of cheesecake.

In the nursing world, we have the opportunity to have so much positive influence in the lives of our patients and our coworkers. If I had a dollar for every time a patient told me a story about a wonderful nurse in their lives, I’d be able to retire to the Caribbean (after the pandemic, of course). But, somehow, our relationships with our coworkers looks more like a scene from Mean Girls than the Golden Girls. Why is that?

Google “Mean Nurses” or “Nurses Eat Their Young” or “Bully Nurses” and you’ll read countless stories of nurses manipulating and hazing one another. It seems crazy to think that a profession that is devoted to caring for and helping others could be so fraught with abuse. Had I not experienced it myself, I never would have believed it possible.

What does this catty behavior look like? Imagine being a brand new nurse on the floor, fresh out of school, a ball of nerves and excitement to get to practice your craft, finally. You are assigned to a veteran nurse, who seems less than thrilled to have you tagging along. You do the best you can to stay out of the way but also be helpful and you think the day is going pretty well. At lunch, you ask the nurse if she’d like to eat together, but she claims to be leaving campus for lunch. No problem, you’ll just eat in the break room and scroll through Instagram. You find a quiet corner and tuck into your tuna sandwich when your ears perk up. The voice is so familiar. It’s your nurse buddy for the day! But what did she just say? “The new nurse they have assigned to me is an idiot. Seriously, she will never last.” You’ve been here for one day. How could she be so cruel? Seems silly, but it’s an everyday thing.

What if you’re a veteran nurse and you recently started dating a doctor on your floor? You keep it completely professional and his job has zero bearing on yours. He can’t pull favors for you and you wouldn’t ask him to, even if he could. HR and upper management are aware and totally okay with this relationship, but, somehow, there is suddenly a chill in the air when you begin your shift. Some of the nurses are making rude comments about your relationship. One even accuses you of thinking you’re too good to be a nurse now that you’re dating a doctor.

I was that veteran nurse. I had fallen in love with one of the doctors at the hospital and quickly became the talk of the unit. People couldn’t stop gossiping about me and my new relationship. Nurses would make up stories and run and tell the nurse manager. They would say that they had seen us kissing in the break room, or that we were seen in a call room together during work hours. I had to constantly defend myself. It wasn’t simply curiosity. This was a deep anger coming from most of the nurses that I worked with. It was as if I had betrayed them on a personal level. The constant whispering and evil stares made me have knots in my stomach on a daily basis. I was scared to even talk to my boyfriend at work for fear that it would be misconstrued. It was a living nightmare. I remember one nurse telling me, “You guys will never make it. He is a player. He isn’t going to stay with you, and if you think that he will then you are lying to yourself”. I ended up transferring to a smaller unit and began to isolate myself completely in my work. I was scared to talk to any of the other nurses. I felt like they had won, and in a sense they had. They bullied me into submission.

These are just some examples of how hard it can be in the nursing industry and it’s really sad. When I think about the people I am battling the sicknesses of the world with, the ones who will be by my side in the worst emergency or the greatest victory, I want to like those people. I want to be friends with those people. I want to know they support me and I want to make sure that I support them. How can we be good nurses if we can’t treat our coworkers well?

And nursing isn’t a profession you can just jump into and be perfect. We all run into things we struggle with in our day to day and that’s okay. It’s okay to be terrible at dressing wounds because you’re probably amazing at starting IVs. It’s okay to be unable to suction a trach because you’re gagging your guts out because you’re probably the girl everyone goes to get that difficult patient to settle down and take their meds. We are better as a team and our profession is one of the most important professions in healthcare. We fought tooth and nail to get into nursing school and to learn the content and put our knowledge to good use. The time for fighting is over. The time for cliques and high school games is done. The lives of our patients and our own livelihoods hang in the balance. We can be wonderful nurses, but we can’t be the best until we are part of the best nursing team. Squad Goals.

10 years later we are still happily married and have two beautiful children together