An Innocent Emergency Room Request Turned Into a Furious Confrontation. Why a Daughter Had to Forcefully Shut Down an Aggressive Nurse.
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Nobody expects to get scolded for trying to help.
That’s exactly what happened after this woman took her mother to the emergency room with a broken foot.
Since there weren’t any wheelchairs available, a triage nurse told her to go find one somewhere else in the hospital.
The woman did exactly what she was told and brought one back, but the nurse immediately started lecturing her for choosing the wrong wheelchair.
When the woman politely asked the nurse to stop scolding her, the situation only became even more uncomfortable.
Now she’s wondering if she crossed the line by standing up for herself.
Let’s check out the full story below.
AITA for telling an ER nurse to stop scolding me after an “incident” with a dirty wheelchair?
I’ve been helping my mom out all week because she has a broken foot. I’ve been driving her around, helping with groceries and the house.
I am 28F. We were at the local hospital ER, and the situation was a mess. When we got there, there were zero wheelchairs available in the ER, so my mom had to use her crutches. She was absolutely exhausted and struggling.
The triage nurse herself was the one who sent me to go find a wheelchair. I started to head out, but I was confused about where to go, so I came back to get further clarification.
The paramedic helped her find a wheelchair.
A paramedic standing there told me she didn’t think there were any left in the main entrance, but the triage nurse told me, “She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She doesn’t work here. I’m the one who works here and knows.”
The paramedic made a bit of a face, but she offered to walk me up anyway since I’d never been to that part of the building, the main entrance (or this hospital in general before).
We got to the wheelchair stack, and I grabbed one from the exact same pile the paramedic did. Hers was clean. Mine looked a little damp, but I’d been at a different hospital last week where they wipe everything down before putting it back, so I assumed it was just wet from disinfectant.
Then, the nurse started lecturing her.
When I got back to the ER, this triage nurse started giving me a moral lecture. She started saying I am, “inconsiderate and need to be more considerate of others” and “taking care of old people,” and “be better,” acting like my mom (who is only in her 50s!) was some senile patient I was neglecting.
I never raised my voice, and I never swore. I just calmly said, “Please stop scolding me.”
That apparently made it worse because then she started scolding me about the fact that I told her to stop scolding me. She kept going on and on about how I, again, “need to do better” and “help the elderly.”
Frustrated, she just kept asking.
I had to say, “Please, just stop,” several times before she finally quit.
My mom was just super stressed and said I shouldn’t have bothered saying anything (which is funny because my mom can be very much the same, lol), but I truly don’t think I did anything wrong.
I was just trying to help my mom in a confusing situation and didn’t think I deserved to be lectured like a child. I’m also not a healthcare worker or taking care of the elderly in my day-to-day interactions, so I don’t know, it felt like I was getting a lecture from a co-worker almost.
AITA?
Yikes! That nurse sounds like she stepped way out of line.
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Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit think about it.
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According to this reader, she needs to make a complaint.
Yes, her behavior was all of those things.
The story was not very clear on that part.
This is a fair assumption, but still.
This whole story feels a little confusing because it never really explains why the nurse started scolding her in the first place.
Was the nurse upset because she left her mother for a few minutes? Was it because the wheelchair turned out to be dirty? Or is there some part of the story that got left out? It almost feels like something is missing because the nurse’s reaction seems so over the top.
If this really is the whole story, then the nurse was completely out of line.
The woman stayed calm, followed the instructions she was given, and simply asked the nurse to stop scolding her. If that’s all it took, then a complaint to the hospital would be completely reasonable.
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