TikTok is known for spreading trends like wildfire, allowing just about any user to go viral. However, that also means one can go viral for all the wrong reasons.
In a now-deleted video, labor and delivery nurses at Emory University Hospital Midtown in Atlanta, Georgia were joining in on the trend wherein social media users share their so-called “icks” — a term usually used when referring to a phenomenon in dating where one might think they like someone but then catch the “ick.”
In essence: a poignant turn-off — only the nurses were talking about patients, CNN reported.
“My ick is when you ask me how much the baby weighs, and it’s still in your hands,” one of the nurses in the video said. Another, in a voice mocking a patient, she says, “Excuse me, excuse me, can I have some water? Excuse me, can I have a blanket?”
Related: The Worst Things People Do on Airplanes, According to TikTok. Are You Guilty?
The video, which has now been deleted, garnered attention from mothers and healthcare workers alike condemning the nurses’ behavior, with one user saying, “Bottom line, patients don’t deserve to be judged by their clinicians.”
A woman shared with CNN that the video brought back “a lot of memories” of how she was once treated by certain nurses — how they seemed neglectful and failed to talk to her — and called the experience “traumatic.”
The nurses in the video have now been fired, and in a statement, Emory Healthcare called the comments made in the TikTok “disrespectful and unprofessional,” and that the employees have been let go.
