I fed the puppy to satan. . . on his birthday, no less

No, the title is not code for "come invade NorCal, the coast is clear", its what I did last night. The puppy, in this case, is a new, wet behind the ears nurse who is still optomistic about the world of nursing in general. If he had a tail, it would wag. Big brown eyes and everything. Satan ended up being the family of a patient that I so graciously turned over to him when we needed to balance off the assignment. Did I know that this family was going to be difficult to deal with? Weeeeel, yes, I had an inkling. They kept coming out of the room to glare at any nurse who was within range. But new nurses NEED to learn to deal with this. That was my rationale. Plus, its not like my other patients were a piece of cake right? (actually, they ended up being very easy patients. Oops.) I felt a twinge of guilt, but figured he'd be ok.
Those family members were very unhappy. What I knew was the tip of the ice berg. They whipped the poor puppy for hours over everything they felt was wrong. The patient was confused about many things, and I even heard the family in there yelling at him a couple times, just because he was confused. Through it all, the puppy didn't even whimper. He did his best to placate the family, even giving the confused old man a bath at 10:30 at night. Were they happy? No way in hell. One of them came out complaining about his method of bathing the patient, while he was still in there cleaning the guy! Finally, the family left. My guilt over turning that patient over to him was at an all time high. Then, looking at his watch, the puppy says "at midnight, its my birthday! Gosh, its been a rotten one so far. . ."
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArgh! the guilt rises even higher. So, I did what any good, jaded nurse would do. I find sugar, lots of it, in the form of ice cream and girl scout cookies. I arranged them beautifully in a bowl, and put some strawberries on top, just so it will look somewhat healthy, and gave the puppy a treat. My co workers all felt that redeemed me, a little bit, from feeding the puppy to satan on his birthday.
The moral of this story (for me) before I give a patient to a new nurse, I will ask them first if its their birthday!