A black nurse from Trinidad gave me my first dialysis treatment in the hospital... I was somewhat worried, because my father was with me and he's a racist. So there I was, not only worried about my first dialysis, but also worried about my father starting some crap with the nurse!
I was pretty surprised when, after my needles were in, my nurse and my father proceeded to have a 2-hour yak-fest about the different islands! My parents had just gotten back from St. Maarten, and my father was happily chatting away with the nurse about different places to go on vacation. They were having such a good time that they were ignoring me! An alarm would go off on my machine and the nurse would adjust the flow, and then she went right back to talking to my father. Talk about freaky! I couldn't wait to tell my mother about it when I went home the next day.
At my unit, we've had lazy, unprofessional nurses of every color... and interestingly, the only prejudiced staff member is a white charge nurse. She finds ways to get rid of black nurses that she doesn't like, but surprisingly she doesn't have a problem with Puerto Rican nurses. (She's even prejudiced in her prejudices!)
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