Where, oh where am I?

[Lost08]

Here's Friday at work:

It pushed me over the edge. The start of the day was a little rough. Not terrible, but not great. There was an agency nurse assigned to an elementary school and administration deemed it necessary for ME to meet her first thing in the morning and show her how to log in to the computer system. What a mess. I had never been to this school, so I was basically orienting myself as I was "orienting" her! Talk about the blind leading the blind! I was told it should only take an hour- ended up being there for 3.5 hours while the nurse from my building kept calling me to see why I wasn't on my way back yet because she needed me. Well, to try and cut a long story short, the substitute nurse was difficult to understand due to a heavy accent, had NO school nurse experience and didn't know how to handle the majority of situations. POOR administrative/managerial decision. She made several significant errors, not the least of which was accidentally administering double the dose of medication to a young student.

The incident with the medication happened towards the end of the day. I knew about it b/c I called to check on her as I was getting ready to go home. The parent was aware and the principal had taken over the situation. Nothing left to do. Well, a nasty secretary from my building suddenly came into my office, interrupting me while I was speaking with a parent to tell me that I was to leave immediately and go over to the elementary school b/c they had an emergency. What??? I told her no, I couldn't go to that school - not only was I in the middle of something with a parent, I was leaving for the day. They would have to ask someone else to go. Now, unless something else had cropped up in the 3 minutes since I had spoken to the substitute nurse, I already knew what the "emergency" was and they certainly didn't need ME to go over there to hand-hold. What about the other nurses?

At the same time, a different staff member came into the office crying, looking for me specifically. I tried to care for her while calling the administrative office to make sure there was a nurse going to the other building. The administrative secretary informed me that yes, another nurse was headed over there. In fact, it was the nurse who has worked in that building for the past upteen years - very experienced and very familiar with the staff and parents. A great person to respond to this need. BUT when I said "Excellent. I'm so glad to hear that" the secretary proceed to yell at me in a venomous tone "No. It is NOT excellent. YOU should have gone there when YOU were told to and the superintendent WILL be taking this up with you" as if I was a child who had just committed some heinous act.

I spoke up and set what I thought was a boundary, saying what I would not do and was really feeling the negative responses. I started to waffle between "Oh, I should go over there and help them. They need someone to handle this" and my knowledge that this was a poor administrative decision to begin with - I had told them in the morning this nurse needed more orientation.

Ugh