Attacks on hospital staff

I don’t know that binge drinking is entirely to blame. There are drugs out there beside EtOH that lower one’s inhibitions.

Speaking from personal experience, I once bit a nurse while in severe pain (she was holding me down while I was having an ileocolonoscopy) and went for another nurse’s throat with my hand while utterly exhausted and sedated with promethazine and was sick and tired of being woken up so I could be checked on as though I were about to die.* I didn’t follow through, but I remember being startled that I was in the process of going after someone. I felt pretty removed from the situation, and was horrified at what I had been in the process of doing. I’m not violent; I don’t have violent thoughts. It was a purely id reaction. (I never actually touched her, so that doesn’t count, but I could see where someone could easily be reduced to such a state.)

In the first instance, the nurse told me to keep biting her so I’d stop trying to get away from the doctor… (haha)

Nonetheless, this isn’t surprising. I’d like to see some stats on “real” attacks where someone makes a real effort to go after someone else instead of a combination of lowered inhibitions, exhaustion, and constantly being bothered while trying to rest.

*Knowing that personnel are doing their job looking after you and keeping this at the forefront of your mind while being woken every 15 minutes at 4am are two different things.

But real violence shouldn’t be tolerated.

“One of the worst cases is that of convicted rapist Donald Gibson, who has served a jail term for assaulting a nurse and racially abusing a hospital security guard.

The jobless 37-year-old has to be escorted in and out of a private room at the Edinburgh hospital for life- saving kidney dialysis three times a week. Only six of the 37 dialysis nurses are prepared to treat him after he threatened to kill another member of staff. The extra security costs the NHS £40,000 a year.”

Why is this waste product on dialysis again?