When I wrote a piece earlier this week, Igor cautioned me not to write angry. When I wrote the piece yesterday about bullying, I tried to write it with cold, clinical calculation to make a point. Then I started to think about it and realized I never spoke to the damage in a personal sense for me. I recently went through back to back bullying episodes. One of them was semi-expected, the other one was not.

I’m trying very hard to not say the real names of the people, although, at this point, my level of anger with both people is off the chart. I know that I have anger issues and I have spent a great deal of my life dealing with them. When combined with PTSD, it is constant work on to manage how anger impacts my life. I’m not saying that I will go off like a bomb at any moment because I won’t. I’m just saying I need to be an adult and regulate my behavior, but I will tell you it is tough. The first person was Beth, no that’s not her real name. Beth was an LPN who was doing a job that was right on the fine line of her scope of practice. She had been doing that job for a while by herself. She had developed a fiefdom in the sense that she wanted to run all aspects of the clinic. When I first started in this position, I had a supervisor that placed strict limits on her and basically told her how things were. About a year into the position, we changed supervisors, and it went downhill from there. The new supervisor was inexperienced and felt that he should be the new broom. He was promoted from within, and while I initially thought he was a decent guy, he turned out to ignore everything that I said (I suggested thumbscrews and the rack, but Master didn’t agree). This included my reports of her bullying. Beth used to sit and watch when I came into work and when I left and would go write down my times to the minute and report them to the supervisor. She took great joy in seeing me written up for being slightly late and it was honestly annoying.

The effect that this had on my home life and personal life was tremendous and disturbing. It became difficult for me, as an adult, to deal with the situation. I was often late because I would sit in my car for fifteen minutes convincing myself that it was time to go into the building and to work. When it was time to leave, I was absolutely, like a sprinter in the blocks trying to get out the door. This attitude was counterproductive because it just added more fuel to the fire that I was a lousy employee. I received accolades up until that point, but it reached the point where even the chief of the service wouldn’t speak to me. As luck would have it, it was time for me to move on anyway and I moved to a medical unit. It became difficult not to bring the daily abuse from my job home. It’s the worst kind of mental abuse that anyone can think of and is almost on the level of my sexual assault while I was in the military.

I went to work every day my abuser as she sat there watching for some perverse reason in the hopes of catching me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I felt completely powerless. At many points, I was just like that thirty-five-year-old nurse in Wales wondering if ending it would be better. My marriage suffered because I lost the ability to effectively communicate with my husband. We were literally hours from divorce at one point because of this woman’s bull shit. When the new position came through, I couldn’t transfer fast enough. I thought, finally, I’m going to move to a place with a good manager and what seemed like good coworkers. Boy was I wrong.

At first, the move was benign. The manager was great, and then I met Michelle. Michelle brought back all the worst feelings about working with somebody that I possibly could have. The manager was good, very conscientious, and very supportive. He asked on a daily basis how school was going and really seemed to take an interest in me and the advancement of my education. During this time, Michelle was pretty much kept at bay by this manager. Then the inevitable, he received orders for active duty and left his position. I was not the only person who dreaded the day he left. We no longer had a supportive manager. Instead, we had a manager who had been in the system for over thirty years and was running her own fiefdom. Does that sound familiar? It was, very familiar, and very scary. For whatever reason, Michelle decided that I was the person she was going to go after and spent all of her time quizzing me on the patients I cared for instead of caring for her own. However, this was not a quiz in the sense of the status of the patient, but a chart quiz.

I tried to follow the advice in the piece I wrote the other day, but it didn’t work. What brought the end of it was her speaking to a patient about me incorrectly medicating them. This was not true. While I have missed meds, I have never given a patient something that was not ordered for them. All of this, I felt, was designed to knock me down by this person. After a lot of personal research, because they don’t make it easy to find, I found the institutional regulations regarding harassment. I started a long and arduous process and began to report everything that this woman did for the last year. Of course, I discovered the 45-day rule, but there was enough there to give them something to start the process. Luckily, again, another transition was occurring, as I had finally been credentialed in my role as a Nurse Practitioner. I do know that Michelle was disciplined, but I am quite sure that she won’t abandon her bullying.

Bullying takes its toll. A lovely nurse and mother in Wales and countless other nurses have ended up hanging from the rafters, overdosing on medications, or eating a gun. Why do we tolerate this kind of bull shit as a society? We see this constantly, and yet we do nothing about it. We hire major publicists to gaslight people into believing that a child did nothing wrong. The bully becomes the “victim” because someone is forcing them to behave like a contributing member of society. It needs to stop. It creates a mental health crisis in this country, and it demeans quality workers and prevents them from doing a quality job. I know I promised Igor I wouldn’t write something angry, but I didn’t feel like I properly finished my blog on doing no harm. I did change the names of the two bullies because, for whatever reason, I’m trying to take the high road and not name them. They do, deserve shame for their behavior and the damage that they’re doing to nursing. Like I said in the do no harm blog, Michelle caused the departure of at least five people besides myself from that unit. That’s high attrition when one person causes five people to search for other jobs that may affect their wage or their pension.

Thankfully the castle is less drafty today, and the hounds are resting quietly at my feet. The bats are booking a flight to Australia. I’m told it’s almost too warm for bats, but I wish them well.