#shitty nurses

Hospitals are the place you’re supposed to go to get help, right? Whether it’s a physical illness or a mental one, here in America we pay for them to help us. We expect the doctors and nurses to be nice and empathetic to our issues, because they are paid to help. I understand that doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and therapists are all people, but being a person doesn’t give them the right to just be a general ass to everyone they want. That, my fellow unenlightened, is what I’m here to talk about.

During April of 2026 I spent around a week inpatient in the adult unit of the Rolling Hills hospital in Franklin Tennessee. During that time I didn’t pay much attention to what was going wrong with me, I just thought they were simple mistakes and they wouldn’t happen that often, and then I talked to some people and learned that some of the staff at the hospital kinda sucked.

From forgetting about meds, to touchy doctors, to not giving someone their mobility aid, Rolling Hills had so much shit go down that the staff didn’t own up to or even talk about ever. I interviewed a friend I made in the hospital. He needs a cane to get around, but the hospital wouldn’t give it to him even after he was sobbing in pain for the first one and a half days he was inpatient. Below, I have what I wrote down during my interview with him:

Why wouldn’t they give you your mobility aid?

“They said it could be used as a weapon.”

He was offered a walker, which could have also been used as a weapon.

Why did they give you your seizure meds late?

For context: he received his seizure medicine three hours late.

“Shift change. I understand that they need shift change, but a nurse said, “a few hours isn’t going to change much.”

He then goes on to explain how he once got his seizure meds an hour late, and during that hour he had a seizure.

Why do you need the cane?

“Connective tissue disorder.”

He explains to me that the tissue between his bones is weaker than most peoples, and he can get dislocations due to it.

DISCLAIMER: He explained to me that he hasn’t been diagnosed with Connective Tissue Disorder yet, despite the fact that he has all of the symptoms. Despite my lack of medical knowledge, I do believe he has this disorder or at least something like it, and that he does need his cane to walk. At one point he let me feel his knee while he was moving his leg and I could feel the bones moving out of place, back into place, and vice versa.

Can you explain why a walker or wheelchair wouldn’t work?

“Walkers can’t have weight put on them. Wheelchairs wouldn’t work because if I’m pushing with my arms it would dislocate my shoulders, and when pushing with my legs it would dislocate my knees.”

It took a day and a half of getting bruised knees and sobbing in pain before they finally gave him his cane. Everyday it took him 15-20 minutes to get down to the cafeteria, he would be sobbing the whole time, then only get 10 minutes to eat due to how long it took him to get down. He did this 4-5 times before he finally was given his cane.

Coming from me - the writer

Uncomfortable about a doctor.

A doctor - medical - was very weird about my weight. For context, I am a 5’8, 277 lbs female, so he was bluntly saying I was overweight. I don’t have a problem with him saying I’m overweight, but my issue is the fact that the way he said it was like he was insinuating it’s the crux of all my problems.

Meds.

On my first day there I wasn’t given any of my meds, on my second day when I was given them they didn’t give me one I had been taking for a few years at this point, I had to bring it up after a day before someone finally told me I had been taken off of it.

Withholding information.

I am 18, I live with my mom, she knows next to everything about me. I went into the hospital talking about my mom and how she should know where I was and what was going on. Apparently during my first and second day there she, and my older sibling, had been calling the hospital to see if I was in there and if I was alright, however, they wouldn’t tell either of them anything, and I wasn’t told that they had been trying to figure out about me. I understand that there are reasons why the hospital won’t give out information, neither had my patient ID at the time, and I get that some people’s families are abusive or bad for them, but they hadn’t even told me that either people had been trying to find out about me. It was only when my mom turned to the last resort of contacting someone she hadn’t been in contact with for a few months, someone who had flirted with her then ghosted her because she turned him down, so he could figure out if I was in the hospital. This person works at rolling hills, and it was because of her contacting him that I was told my mom had been trying to figure out about me, but they never told me about my older sibling, I only learned my older sibling was trying to find out about me when I called them.

There are a few other instances I’d like to talk about, though the people these things happened to I didn’t interview either due to lack of time or them being unable or uncomfortable with talking about.

The reason behind this whole thing.

I made a friend in the hospital, she was a mother going through a rough patch with her husband. She was inpatient, like me, but she didn’t want, or need, to be. According to her, the nurses she spoke to had lied to her before she went inpatient, she just went to Rolling Hills to try and get an outpatient therapist. Her family had apparently contacted the hospital and spun a story that she needed to be inpatient, and the hospital was believing them over her. This woman showed no signs of violence, suicidal tendencies, or anything that would make her need to be inpatient, the hospital only kept her due to her family’s input. She had tried going AMA (against medical advice) and they said that they would forcefully keep her if she followed through with it.

Touchy doctor.

I won’t name any names of the people who went through this, however, Dr.Thati, you are not safe from me. One person who I heard of this happening to, made a formal complaint to management and couldn’t talk to me about this, but the other one didn’t and told me a bit of what happened when she was with him. The two people I know of this happening to are both young adults, early twenties, and look younger than they are. The description I got from the one who didn’t make a complaint was that Dr.Thati was rubbing her back when he was checking her heartbeat, he sorta caressed her arm as she was leaving the room, and at one point touched her butt.

I won’t be able to go into much detail about this, I didn’t press either person about this.

Bad nurses.

Some people inpatient with me would be complaining and talking shit about nurses we were stuck with. I thought it may be spite at first, then I saw why shit was being talked. Most of what I heard and saw comes down to a glaring lack of empathy from the nurses in a mental hospital. One moment one of them would be teasing someone who clearly looks uncomfortable, next they would be addressing the room like they’re the most loved person there. The way my friend perfectly described them was, “Some of them are actually nice and actually care, while others are just high school mean girls who wanted to say they did something nice.”

Coming from the person who wasn’t given their mobility aid (who I got the number of) - “after you left the hospital there was an incident. Our two groups merged into one big group, and we were all laughing and making jokes, and then one person made a joke and four people started crashing out. There were no nurses in the room, so me and one other person started trying to help people. We help everyone except for one person, and I go to help him. He isn’t really talking to me, but after a bit he asks me to get a nurse. I’m, as quick as I can, making my way to the nurse’s station, and there’s no one up there. I find a nurse and say that there’s someone in the dayroom who needs help, and he just responds by saying, “You don’t know what the person’s file is or what they need, you should go back to the dayroom.” So I go back to the dayroom, and the person is still crashing out. After some time, there are still no nurses, so I go back to the nurse’s station. I find that same nurse and ask again, and he seems to be getting annoyed with me for asking for help. I snapped and said I’d sit by the door where I know the nurses are until one comes out so I can ask for help. That same nurse was trying to get me to go back to the dayroom when another nurse showed up, eating. I say that we need help in the dayroom, the nurse asks why, I explain it, and they say “We’ll be there in a minute.” And I am getting pissed. It’s been over 30 minutes at this point and people are still crashing out. I go back to wait for the nurses, then a tech shows up and starts taking everyone’s vitals. I go back up to the nurse’s station and ask what’s going on and they say they need everyone’s vitals first. After getting everyone’s vitals, the nurses show up, ask the guy who asked for a nurse basic questions like “How are you doing today? Have you had any suicidal thoughts today?” Then they bring him up to the nurse’s station and I don’t follow. He comes back after a bit and I ask if he’s okay, he just says “I’m fine.” and I know he’s lying. He was calmer, so I just assumed they gave him something to calm him down.”

Another thing I was told about: Someone was going to discharge, but the nurses saw him sitting “too close” to someone, so they moved him to another unit before he discharged. He wasn’t able to say goodbye to anyone, and the nurses weren’t telling anyone what happened to him. The person he was sitting close to ended up doing self harming behavior because their friend disappeared. That person was sedated and strapped up before being taken away. The nurses weren’t in the room to prevent the self harm from happening, and they were dramatic when it came to dealing with it. The nurses were dramatic about “sitting too close together” and when he was comforting his friend, they were dramatic about how to deal with the self harming behaviors, and they weren’t even in the room to prevent this from happening.

I specifically remember my friend who needed his cane saying, “Disabled people should not come here.” I myself am not disabled in any way that I know of, but from his descriptions of his time there I would agree with him.

@sicktember

Tai hated his stupid body sometimes. Not only had he ended up in hospital, which was bad enough, but now he couldn’t get his fucking sugars where they were supposed to be. His phone was always going off, alerts he was too high. He was doing everything right, trying desperately, but it just wouldn’t settle. Why was it that even though he was doing the exact same as he would at home, and yet it just wouldn’t come down. 

It made him feel even worse, too. Not only was he dealing with his scope going wrong, but being high all the time made him just feel shocking. He was exhausted and just feeling so weak and wiped out. And he was fed up of the nurses tutting every time they took his readings. Plus, he was really fed up of being endlessly poked. He didn’t like needles at the best of times (though they were better when he was doing it himself, which of course he couldn’t do in hospital) and now they were constantly badgering him. 

And then he had to see the diabetes nurse. 

Great. 

1. Explain that the mask that they're putting on the child's face is to help them breathe during surgery

When the doctors/nurses tried to put it on me they didn't explain what it was for so I started punching and kicking because I thought they were trying to suffocate me. Instead of calming me down and explaining that it's to help me breath during surgery they strapped me down.

2. Give the child pain killers when they wake up from surgery

When I woke up from surgery I was screaming in pain, and instead of giving me something for the pain the nurse says to my parents: