Kicking off the New Year the Wrong Way

My apologies to my avid fans for not posting anything substantial recently. In fact, I think it’s been a month of so since I’ve posted anything at all. Much has happened since my last post and I realize that it’s going to take a few posts to catch you up on life. I guess I’ll start with New Years and I’ll briefly mention how lame I was. My grandfather was in town from Arizona and he drank me under the table! I think I passed out around 10:30 because of all the tequila and gladiators I drank in such a short period of time. A little background, my father is Mexican and we were drinking tequila. Bad choice to challenge an old man who has been drinking this stuff his entire life! Well needless to say, he was drinking it like water and I was struggling to keep up. I remember him saying, “I can’t believe I’m drinking with my grandson. I would have thought he could drink more seeing as how you’re young and you drink with your friends.” I actually puked that night and it was a little embarrassing.
3 days into the New Year, I also got assaulted by a 17 year old male patient. He was trouble from the moment I got on shift but I dealt with his anger and noncompliance throughout the evening. At visitation, I sent him to his room for inappropriate language in front of the younger children and parents and he absolutely blew out! I gave him a two minute timeout to separate him from the others just to get himself under control. Sadly, the opposite happened. He went to his room and started throwing furniture and yelling quite loudly. I followed to inform him that he wasn’t in trouble, but that his language wasn’t suitable for our guests and that it was bothering people. He told me that I was pissing him off with my bossy attitude and said he was going to do something about it. He grabbed the pen off my lanyard and forcefully pushed it into my throat. He told me he could kill me and that he wouldn’t even feel bad about it. Not realizing the danger, I asked him “are you really going to kill me over a 2 minute timeout?” This probably wasn’t the right thing to say but in my mind it was so ridiculous that the question needed to be asked. My staff quickly realized what was happening and tried calming him down. I told him that this type of behavior wasn’t appropriate on my unit and he said, “When I stepped onto the unit, it became my fucking unit.” A code green was called and this pissed him off because he knew that others were coming to help and that it was going to be a hands on operation. He punched the wall and another staff member stepped in. He noticed me slipping out of the room and threw the pen with such a force that it punctured my left eyelid and caused temporary blindness in both my eyes. My eye was swollen shut in minutes. I later discovered at the Urgent Care Hospital that he had caused a microabrasion to my cornea. Two other staff were seriously injured but he was eventually taken down forcefully and later taken into custody by the police. All three of us who he had injured pressed charges and he was banned from the facility. Talk about a great beginning to the New Year. I suppose I would have been angrier about what went down but I was leaving on a vacation in a few days and didn’t want it to ruin my plans. More on that in my next post!