I hate confrontations and rude people

[ladyauthor2b]

I'm not a confrontational person. I hate to be angry but hate it more when people get rude, especially when it's aimed at me. Today it happened to me. I was trying to be helpful, courteous, in my view.

See, I work at a hospital. The nurses on my service go up on the floors to make rounds with the doctors.  As I was entering the data on the patient in our office, I found out it was a re-admission we already followed. Someone already seen, treated, and released. It wasn't necessary for the nurse to do anything further with the patient. And we took it out of our registry. 

Now I could either page or text message her, but the text message system was down. So I paged the nurse so she'd call me back. I relayed the information, to include letting her know the text system wasn't working. Her comment to me was "next time wait until we get back to the office as I'm on rounds."  That's it. Ok, on her side, perhaps she was really busy on the floor, but her tone was cold and flippant. She could have just said "thanks" and hung up. I don't know.

This nurse continues to make snide remarks about different things. We don't take messages correctly or obtain enough information (on personal phone calls, not work related).  I feel she deems us stupid and worthless. I hate feeling like a substandard person just because I don't have initials behind my last name. Plus I'm older than her, so why can't she just talk to me out of simple respect? I'm venting here. I told my boss what happened and that she's always rude and I was tired of it. He told me to confront her one on one in private and let her know "my feelings." 

So hence, my other dilemna. I hate confrontations. I'm the type of person who struggles for words. Fear grips my soul and I get wishy washy enough to cry because I'm upset/angry. I don't want to CRY in front of this person.  I know I should follow my boss's advice and say something to this nurse.  I thought I would be the bigger person and apologize first, that I'm sorry if I disrupted her at a busy moment.  I have the feeling she will comment something ad lib, something rude again. The boss said he'd be willing to meet with both of us if I felt the issue was unresolved, but would he have MY back? I am disgruntled with his actions too.

So tomorrow, I will face my fears. I didn't want to do this today because Mondays are just too darn busy for me.  I suppose this nurse was very busy too, just following the crowd of residents and senior staff to hear the update on the patients, something she could have read from the chart later. 

I just get this feeling with her, that no matter which way I had done this, whether I told her later or not, she would have chewed me out about it.  So I'm damned if I do and I'm damned it I don't..  I hate rude people. I hate being put on the spot like this. And a bigger part of me just want to ignore what happened today and just move on, but then how would she find out how she makes me feel if I don't speak up?  Arrgggghhh!!!