WE CAN BUT DARE WE:
You are a nurse in the emergency room, working the Friday 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift, and your evening has been filled with the usual mix of drunken belligerent teens, wailing babies, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations, falls, fractures, and the routine, regular congestive heart failure (CHF) patients. Your best friend is texting you from the concert that you had to miss tonight because you were scheduled to work, and you respond to her between care of patients, jealous that she is there and you are not. “What a jerk to torture me like this!” you think to yourself.
It is now 2 a.m., and the medics radio once again, notifying you of an incoming motor vehicle accident victim, ETA of 5 minutes. You sigh and opt to use the restroom, rather than getting that much needed cup of coffee, and prepare a room for your next patient. The medics roll in and begin to fill you in. The patient is a 28-year-old male, a passenger on a bus that was involved in a crash, leaving the vehicle overturned after rolling over an embankment. There were several fatalities among the bus passengers, and “this victim has remained unconscious, though his vitals are currently” . . . and as you start to focus on the patient, you take a second look. Can it be? It is! The lead singer, Jerod, from the band “Blue Lizards,” who you have adored since you first heard his voice! The band had just left the concert that you had missed last evening when the accident occurred. You quickly text your best friend . . . “Can you believe?” and she responds with “Yeah, right. PROVE IT.” So you quickly snap a picture with your smartphone, when alone with the patient, and send it to her. Can’t hurt, right? Celebrities are “public property,” and that’s a part of their life, right? Just for good measure, you snap a few more pictures of the unconscious singer in various stages of undress and then a shot of his home address, phone number, and demographic information from his electronic health record. You sit your phone down on the bedside table for a minute as you continue your assessment of the patient.
At 7:00 a.m., you drag your tired body home and straight to bed after a long but eventful night.
What happens next? Choose a conclusion, and base the paper and your reflections off of that conclusion.
• You are the following nurse on the day shift and discover the night nurse’s phone on the bedside table. Trying to figure out who it belongs to, you open the phone and see the photographs taken the night before. Holy moly! What a find, and nobody could trace you to the photos.
• You receive a call from the gossip paper the Gossip Gazette, offering you $20,000 for the photos you have taken (courtesy of your best friend). Your identity would never be revealed, and you desperately need a new car and are behind on some bills.
• You go on Facebook, on your day off, and talk about the night you had at work and how you didn’t really feel as bad having to miss the concert, because you actually got to meet Jerod in person and even “Got his number!” You then post a picture of Jerod on Facebook and Instagram, figuring that most of your contacts would never recognize him anyway. It’s your day off and your personal time, so no harm, no foul, right?
• You receive a message the next morning from a peer at work that there is a big investigation being conducted at work due to a HIPAA violation and that it involved a celebrity who had been admitted to the hospital. The word is that legal action is being taken against the hospital due to some photos that were sold to the Gossip Gazette. Knowing that your only sent photo is safe with your best friend, you reach for your smartphone . . . and it is nowhere to be found.