Nurses

One of my best friends, Cup had interned at a white hospital in Michigan and had come to the “G’s” as a 1st year surgery resident. On his first day on the unit he walked up to the nurses station waiting for the nurses to all stand and ask which charts he wanted like where he interned. The head nurse looked up and said to all within her voice “ I wonder what this big fat mutha fucka wants”. Right then he knew he would have to get on the good side of the nurses at the “G’s”.
They literally ran the hospital and no matter how smart or connected you were, they could cut you down or embarrass you in front of patient and peer alike.
Remember nurses are with patients 24/7 and can call or not call with salient information especially if they don’t respect you. So you have to always be on their good side. If you were a sound sleeper and a nurse called you for an emergency she might keep calling if she liked you, but if you were a prick she would let you sleep and pass the information on to your chief or dept. head thus getting you reprimanded. Many a doctor’s career was ruined because of this.
One time in the operating room, we were well into a difficult case and it was nearing a shift change. The scrub nurse replacement had not shown up and as the chief reached out for an instrument, the nurse said “ baby, I loaded you some suture and stuff on the mayo stand and I’m out of here ‘ cause my man is down in the car waiting. Bye!” All you could do was keep operating until her replacement arrived. You couldn’t report it to anyone because she would have done the same thing to Dr Sinkler or Dr.Smiley.
There was a tacit relationship that existed some of it probably due to their nursing skills and some due to romantic liaisons that precluded any and all discipline. It was just understood that nurses ruled!


Homer G. had a nursing school where a large number of Black nurses got their training and some smaller schools in the south sent student nurses to rotate their, usually for 4 month stints. With a fresh crop of mostly attractive young women coming from places like Baton Rouge or New Orleans, it was like being in nurses heaven.
One night my chief and I took 2 nurses over to East St. Louis to party. Speeding back to the hospital well after their curfew, he knocked down a whole line of traffic cones. The police stopped him and proceed to arrest him for drunken driving. The officer asked what he did and G replied I’m a doctor. The cop replied I don’t like doctors because they didn’t treat my son right in the ER and he almost died. To which G replied I would have let him. I’m in the back of the car knowing that out careers and these student nurses are on the line.
The cop sticks his head in and ask me to follow them to the precinct house, I have quickly sobered up and am trying to comfort two scared young women.
When we get to the station there is a night court judge and they bring G before him. I try to signal him not to say anything but he goes into a rant about how he was driving ok. I asked the judge could I speak to him in private and he beckoned to the bench. I told the judge what the situation was and that we worked at the “G’s” and had just gone out for some R&R and indeed my friend was drunk and wrong; also that these were innocent nursing students that would be expelled from school if this was found out. I don’t know what influenced the judge but he told me to get out and take G and if he ever saw G again he would put him under the jail.
When we got back in the car I told him, “nigga you owe me and good, we all could have been fucked”
We were able to slip the students back into their dorm and no one found out about the incident, but after that I had to cut G loose.