Questioning

This morning I got a disturbing email. It came to my work email, return address for the Better Business Bureau. In ominously toned wording it explained that in an attachment was a detailed complaint from a patient regarding their interactions with me and I would need to respond promptly to the complaint. Uho, what did I do? Nervously I clicked on the attachment link. The page wouldn't load. Great.

The rest of the day I felt that twinge of anxiety. What did I do? I generally have good interactions with my patients, I can't remember anything out of the normal happening.... but it must have been big for them to go through all the effort to find out my name (nobody remembers my name) and officially complain about me! Maybe it had been a bad day and I was rude without realizing it... Did someone find my blog and deem it inappropriate and a HIPPA violation? Could I get fired??

Maybe it was dramatic but you know how that spiral starts. I began imagining what would happen if I lost my job. I've worked with a couple outstanding people that got fired for surprising incidents. Me and my kids would loose our healthcare coverage. We'd have to go on my husbands plan which would be hundreds more a month plus my loss of income. Could I get another job? Surely I could, right? And the questions continued swirling...

Am I really not a very good nurse? Is there something about the way I treat people that I haven't noticed about myself? Is God trying to show me something about myself that needs to be worked on? I tried over and over to open that stupid attachment. All I knew was there was a looming complaint, and I'd feel so much better if I could just deal with it head on, all cards on the table, without wondering how bad it could be. Finally I dialed the number at the bottom of the email for the Better Business Bureau.

And what do you know. There was a recorded message about a fraudulent email sent out with a phony attachment that might contain a virus. No complaint. As the relief wore off I felt a little bit silly about how much anxiety I worked up over it. But it highlighted for me one of the major fears of nursing. That you can do well by 99.8% of people, but all it can take is one good mistake to derail your career or your life. One serious medication error. One significant slip of judgement on sharing information. One mishandling of violent patient. I'm thinking of real scenarios here. I think of the Seattle nurse who committed suicide after accidentally overdosing a fragile neonate. The ever present potential for everything to come crumbing out from under your feet. I think we all feel it subtly in the background, sometimes certain situations bring it careening to the foreground.

But there was something else in the middle of my anxious questioning. And that was a true belief that even in the unlikely and worse case scenario, God was going to take care of me. If I'd really done something wrong, He would use it to discipline me and make me a better person. If I lost something so important to me as my job, I knew there would be a reason and a good behind it. So there are things to be learned, even in anxious overreactions.

So if any of my co workers out there got the same email, relax, its a fraud. Oh, and scan your computer for viruses.