That nurse should've been ashamed of herself. Unfortunately, health care is one of the LEAST understanding of professions when it comes to practitioners who are ill......try calling in sick a couple of times and see where it gets you.

And with mental illness, the stigma is even worse, though I'd be willing to bet every other nurse out there has an Rx for Prozac or Xanax because the work is so damned stressful. There's this unwritten code that infers that it's OK to be depressed and anxious; just don't have anything 'exotic' like bipolar disorder or OCD, or the powers that be won't know what to do with you. The last nurse manager I told about my illness (and I only did so because circumstances forced me to) said, "Oh, that explains a lot---your work habits are certainly consistent with your diagnosis." Ye gawds.

My immediate supervisor is vastly less judgmental, perhaps because he doesn't really understand the disorder, but he cares about what it does to me, and that's all that matters as far as he's concerned. He's given me "mental health" days that I didn't have to take vacation days for; he works with me to accommodate the times when I'm not well and need to stay away from the noise and the phones and the traffic in and out of my shared office.