Toxic work environment

Well, I guess it was my turn. I got to have my day with the toxic coworker.

It came out of nowhere to be honest. I was LITERALLY just sitting there working on the inpatient list and behind me I hear:

“F*ucking lazy nurses” and “nurses never get off their lazy @ssess” and my personal fave, “they are delaying patient care!”

Now, this is coming from one of the supervisors. I am fuming! However, instead of leadership stopping this behavior from continuing I was told to keep calm and just ignore it.

Now if at this point you are glaring at your screen like, “WTF?”, I am pretty sure I had the same look at that moment.

I decided to go up my chain of command and apparently it went up their chain as well. I mean, did this person really think I was going to let them say such disrespectful things and not say anything? Apparently, they did.

So now there is this toxic work environment once the shift changes. The awkwardness is palpable. Communication between the nurses and the technologists changes. There is still hostility that can be felt. Unfortunately, a lot of the vibe change is spurred on by the supervisor that started all this . I have been told that this person rolls their eyes when I am walking away. They avoid speaking to me. They refuse eye contact. In a sense, they avoid me at all costs.

Honestly, I don’t understand why we are dragging this on. Toxicity benefits no one. It leads to an “us vs them” type of feeling. I am hoping as time goes by the toxic feeling will begin to leave our department. It is hard to work in a truly toxic work environment. A department can’t function like that for very long. We can either rise above or get sucked in and weighed down. I think there are enough of us there that will fight to rise above it… at least I hope so.