She was a nurse up until recently (finally retired after trying and failing 4 times)
She got into it a little later in life and worked as an army nurse for a while before working regularly as a hospital nurse.
Most of the other nurses were either also new and young and did what they were told or older and experienced and were used to being bullied by the doctors. As she had dealt with soldiers and had to learn to tell army dudes what to do, she had no interest in letting doctors treat her less than them.
At her hospital the doctors would go into a room looking for something, ransack it, then leave it messy for a nurse to clean up. The first time one tried that on her she stood in the door and said he wasn’t leaving until he cleaned his mess. He tried to say he was busy and couldn’t take the time to clean and she said if someone started dying she’d let him know, and didn’t move until he cleaned his mess.
She became a terror to the doctors who she did not let give any shit. If she paged a doctor and he didn’t come right away, he needed a good reason and lying wouldn’t work because the nurses would tattle and say he was doing a crossword and ignored her, so if she paged they had to go after her or else she’d yell at them.
One time in particular a doctor was chatting with a nurse and didn’t notice she’d paged him five times. When he realized he went running down the hall, saying “Out of my way, [name] is mad at me!”
When my moms gallbladder was inflamed and near bursting after my brother was born, she went to my grandmas hospital. They told her she was fine and to wait, while she was on the floor holding her stomach and crying. My dad called my grandma and told her the situation so she marched down to the ER and said “That’s my daughter, what time today can you get her in for surgery?” When they tried to say they thought she should go home my grandma wouldn’t let them. Luckily they got her into surgery in time to avoid it bursting.
During the AIDS crisis, she also bullied the other nurses who would refuse to treat anyone with AIDS. She said if you treat smokers who gave themselves lung cancer you don’t get to turn around and say you won’t help an AIDS patient who you blamed for contracting the disease. Her favorite patient from that time was a man who got it from doing drugs that she took care of regularly. He had a cat named Speed Ball and he would bring in pictures to show her.
