- Slapheads: Malingerers
- Slapheads: Student Nurses
- Slapheads: lecturers (and a mentor)
- Slapheads: Healthcare Assistants
- Slapheads: Patients
- Slapheads: Consultants
- Slapheads: RMNs
- Slapheads: Managers
- Slapheads: Parents
- Slaphead RGNs
- Slapheads: GPs
- Slapheads: Professions Allied to Medicine
- Slapheads: Social Workers
- Slapheads – Meetings
- Slapheads: Mentors
As always I am gutted that html does not have a satire tag. I have been very lucky in that I have met very few patients that I could call Slapheads; yes that includes people with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Their families on the other hand …
All the following should be read with tongue firmly in cheek.
Druggy Dave
Dave is a gentleman who uses the services fairly heavily. A regular ward denizen. Despite the simple equation of heavy drug taking occurring suspiciously regularly before admission he believes there is no connection (1). Often oddly herbal smells can be detected in his vicinity. Oddly enough the herbal smell becomes contagious when Dave is on the ward. Dave often prefers a ground level room with a window that open far enough to allow small packages to be passed through.
Jumped Up Jessa (2)
Jessa is really annoying. You know your ward has limited therapeutic activities to offer. Yoga is the only option half way suitable. She with her *big brain* argues with her hifalutin words that it is *not* suitable. She also has a nasty tendency to do things like asking you for the evidence base of your care plans, sometimes she even wants to read them! Regrettably Jessa probably knows more about mental health than half the nursing staff.
Conversational Chris
You have a strict timetable and allocated time to all your patients ensuring that your shift is going to run like clockwork. You are getting to the end of your chat with Chris and begin doing the wrapping up routine. With his fear of being left to do nothing except twiddle his thumbs for the rest of the day Chris decides to extend the conversation by telling you something horrific before you leave. Tears may be involved. Unless you are callous enough to walk out on someone in the midst of an emotional meltdown the rest of the shift is stuffed.
Watch Me Wilma
Wilma likes an audience, other patients or staff does not really matter to her. She is the one who ensures that you see her sprinting for the door just when you have sat down with the Sun (4). Or makes a loud screaming noise before self harming, instead of doing it quietly in the bathroom like a civilized person. If no staff are handy she will ‘faint’ dramatically in the middle of the common room, probably with the back of her hand to her forehead, ensuring other patients will react and find the staff hidden behind the office desk.
Insightless Iain
Refuses to accept he is unwell despite your explanation that hearing Radio Moscow on your fillings is a hallucination.
End of Shift Edna
Edna is many people, both on the ward and in the community. She is the one who will ensure something happens right at the end your shift just when you are getting ready to go out the door. Or even better just when you are about to go on holiday or finish you last night shift of the month. She will quite deliberately use her personal disaster to specifically mess up your life.Edna gets bonus points from the other patients if you have to fill out a needlessly complex incident report, twice. An Edna of mine once quite plainly chose to pass away from natural causes just when I was doing a quick headcount as a favour to the incoming shift (5).
Larry The Liar
Larry has problems with joined up thinking sometimes. He will tell a Staff Nurse on the morning shift that he is particularly suicidal and can not guarantee his safety, normally when he is Conversational Chris mode. The has the brazen cheek to ask the afternoon shift if he can go out on unescorted leave during the afternoon for a quick trip to Boots (6). Then looks stunned when you say no. A Larry I remember really had no idea that nurses would sometimes discuss the business of the day during handover, accidentally (7).
Movie Struck Mildred
Mildred is the one who, after admission, wonders why she is not lying on a leather sofa speaking to a bearded psychologist for an hour a day. On the NHS. While in an inner city acute ward. Mildred comes in many forms depending on which media interpretations of psychiatry she has been exposed to.
Next up Slapheads: Managers if no one else does it first. Still an open invite for someone else to write Slapheads:Nurses if they like.
(1) Yes I know there is an argument that people try to self medicate when becoming unwell. Ignore that please.
(2) *ahem* Sorry, could not resist.
(3) Missing.
(4) For the sports pages.
(5) Just made that up.
(6) Sorry I meant this (http://www.boots.com/en/Boots-Paracetamol-500mg-16-Capsules_33191/).
(7) True.
I feel so honored to be counted among the slapheads! The cockles of my heart feel warm and fuzzy. But I fear I am a bit of an impostor, because when I am ill enough to actually be a patient, I am not nearly as jumped up as I am here. Yes, I do ask those annoying questions enough to be annoying, but I am not nearly as assertive or insistent about it as I am when I am well. After not very long, my passivity, pessimism, and fear overcome my frustration enough to shut me up. (So those annoying questions that make staff hate me are actually a sign of health and should therefore probably be encouraged. Oh the irony.)
Re: footnote 7: Aren’t nurses discussing the business of the day at handover on purpose?
Lemming Lisa
Lisa takes everything the staff says at face value, questioning nothing. If staff suggests that she do some affirmations, she will become a dedicated disciple, even evangelizing the Gospel of Affirmations to other patients. To some degree, staff will find her to be less of a slaphead than other patients will. Jessa especially dislikes Lisa, but feels sorry for her, as she has clearly been brainwashed.
Mystery Melissa
Melissa doesn’t really know why she is in the hospital. Other patients don’t understand why Melissa is in the hospital. In the eating disorder unit, she is maybe on a bit of an extreme diet; in the self-injury unit, she maybe cut herself once or twice; but she certainly isn’t mentally ill, though perhaps a little daft. The staff don’t seem to think she really belongs in the hospital either (but they won’t admit this to Melissa or the other patients) and they let her out with a lot less fuss than other patients. This makes other patients jealous.
Glad your cockles are warm and fuzzy. Never actually met a jumped up Jessa, normally my clients tend to walk away and glaze over if I try to inform them of too much.
Maybe I am just boring.
Edna though. Met her in many many forms.
The only reason my eyes would have ever glazed over when being given information was when I had heard it all before, it was nothing new, and when it was new, but was also bullshit/lies/propaganda. If anyone would have actually answered the questions I was asking, my ears would have pricked right up.
“Re: footnote 7: Aren’t nurses discussing the business of the day at handover on purpose?”
No. Normally the topics cover X-Factor and management sexcapades. Very little time for talking about the ‘little people’
Social Sadie- You see her wandering around the ward daily, but she dissapears at night. Because she WAS a patient, but now takes the chance to come in and visit all of her ‘friends’ daily, because she misses the warm, infantilising allure of the ward, much like a college grad returning for mum to do washing and home-cooking… she’s been discharged… but hasn’t quite been able to leave
Competing Cassie- Sidles up to any newbie and blatantly asks their diagnosis, number of admissions ect and then explains how they top that. “2 admissions this year? Oooooh, well this my 5th! But you know I don’t just have depression like you, I also have….blah blah blha.
AND MY LEAST FAV, MOST SLAPHEAD PATIENT OF ALL.
(Keep in mind Im from Australia, so we are all on at least a basic pension payment…)
Scabbing Sam: Constantly asks for cigarettes, never has any cigarettes of his own. Likes to forage around in front of you picking up old butts (ewww) and smoking them, so you feel really guilty when you say no.
How did I miss Competing Cassie? Round my neck of the woods we would call her Northern Nora (or Norman).
“You think you’re poor, when I were a lass we had to eat our own toenails for dinner.”
“Toenails! We dreamed of toenails …”
And so on.
intense ian: don’t play chess with this guy, not only will you never win, your every move will be scutinised and your mistake explained at length as a mathematical formula, so intense you wonder if you are actually playing russian roulette. Only matched in intensity by 2 x intense ian’s playing chess with one another.
‘Seemingly Supercilious Serena‘
The one that both the staff and patients think is a right stuck up old cow because she won’t ‘engage’ with you when actually she is painfully shy and seriously scared of you.
Oh shit, that was me all through university. My wife says she was scared to approach me because I seemed to confident and aloof. HAHAHAHAHA. Apparently “I’m too good to talk to you” is how my abject terror manifests.
“too”, not “to”. Dammit.