These are the people I deal with.

Whoever said that school nursing was a kick back, no stress job for nurses on their way to retirement obviously never worked at my schools. 

One of my middle school girls was diagnosed with epilepsy over break. The first Monday back, Epilepsy Mom, as she will be called, brought a note from the doctor excusing her from P.E. and requested the secretaries have me notify her teachers and call her when I was in on my regular day, Wednesday. As directed, I notified the teachers Monday and called her first thing Wednesday. Epilepsy Mom launched into a rant on why teachers should be CPR certified (I agree but why they are not is a question for the District Office), what I was going to do to keep other kids from bullying her daughter for having seizures, etc. During this rant she said she felt uneasy letting her daughter go to school, because she felt I have never handled “this sort of thing” before. I shut her up quickly when I told her I have in fact worked for Easter Seals, a number of whose clients are epileptics, and I have epileptics at my other schools (sort of true). When she finally let me talk, I started to ask her about the details of her daughter’s diagnosis: what kind of seizure, how often, when the last one was… This woman could not answer a single question. Not a single one. No clue what medication her daughter’s on, no clue what kind of seizure (knowing whether to expect grand mal or simple partial, for example, would be nice), nada, zip, nothing. So I spent over ten minutes being chewed out for having teachers that are not CPR certified and didn’t get a single detail on her daughter’s diagnosis.

Nebulizer Girl with the B***h Mom is a whole other story. There’s an indescribably atrocious woman who has an asthmatic kindergartener, and she has an order for nebulizer treatments for her daughter. When she came to the office to notify us of this, I tried calling the ever-difficult to reach coordinator to ask the procedure on this, but of course could not reach her. I called the other experienced nurse I know, and was told that we only accept such medication treatments if the child can independently handle the treatment, otherwise the parent must come and give the treatment or take the child home. The mother walked out on me when I was getting clarification on this, but apparently returned the following day cussing out the secretaries, saying they were going to kill her daughter. At this point, the coordinator became involved, also getting an earful from the mother (this was Friday afternoon and I thankfully was off at the vision workshop, because I don’t think I would have tolerated it by that point in the week). Now it’s been decided that I do need to accept the nebulizer treatments, which means if she needs it at school I will be on call to come assess and deliver the medication if necessary. The conundrum here is that B***h Mom is late to school literally every day, and claims it was because of the nebulizer treatments. The treatment should only be able to be administered every 4-6 hours, and if she’s giving it at 10 and the girl is in PM Kindergarten class, she shouldn’t need it at school… But mom is insisting she might, which either means it’s not working, or mom’s not doing it right, and either way, we know mom will not be accessible should we need to call her and say, ask when the last administration of the medication was. Basically, this is a 9-1-1 call waiting to happen. My conversation with the coordinator about this ended with yet another, “Boy, you really get everything.” Lucky me.