Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Still Not Convinced?

Today I got written up, made to cry at least three times and told I needed to have an emergency meeting with my instructor all because one client said I didn't smile enough and was short with them.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

A Plea For Innocence

Lately it seems that every second person wants to be a nurse. They want the good money, the long stretches of time off, the guaranteed job, the ability to travel. They want all the perks that come from having a job that has one of the most powerful unions out there and uses it's power to get nice big pay raises. And, let's be honest, they want to wear scrubs and run around the hospital giving CPR and yelling things like "I need another round of Epi, STAT!"

Now, I want to make this very clear. I'm not judging. I am in nursing school for all the reasons listed above. And I'm honest about it. When they asked us all in first year why we were in nursing our whole class sounded like a Miss America pageant with "helping people" replacing "world peace". When I said "for the money" people looked at me like I'd just flushed their goldfish down the toilet while smoking a cigar made out of the last panda bear.

So, I'm not judging. I just want people to make informed decisions. That's part of being a nurse. It's too late for me. I'm 3 1/2 years in. At this point I've written 300 pages of self reflection, 100 papers on topics as enthralling as "Uncle T's Chronic Ulcer" and "How My Personal Trauma, Explained in Depth in This Paper, Makes Me a Better Nurse". I have spent what feels like 9000 days in clinical, worked two summers as an undergrad (read: low level labourer) and worked as a care aid to support my scrub buying habit. I owe like $30,000 to the government and still haven't managed to find a way to make it go away. Basically, if I don't finish the last 6 months of the program now I will hate myself forever. But it's not too late for everyone else.

As a public service I have decided to put together a list of reasons that you, and everyone around you, really, really shouldn't become a nurse. I mean, there's the obvious. There aren't enough nurses. There are too many patients. There aren't enough beds. Still too many patients. Doctors are mean and NOT hot like on Grey's Anatomy. You will, most likely, ruin your back. Blah, blah, blah. There's also the other reasons. Here they are. Read, contemplate, run in the other direction.

1. Shit.
Literally, shit. As a nurse you will get shit on. And I don't mean you will accidentally get some on your hands when changing an oldies bottoms. That happens pretty much every 5 minutes. I mean that sometime in your career, for most people several times, someone will find a way to actually expel shit directly from their body onto yours. I personally have been sprayed by a patient while I was standing 5 feet from her bed. My friend had a client poo ON HER HEAD and spent the rest of the year being called Capt. Bowel Movement by her instructor. The same goes for vomit, sputum and blood.

2. People call you names.
Sure most of them have dementia, so really it doesn't mean much. But after a whole day of being called things that I'm pretty sure even sailors don't call cheap hookers anymore it becomes VERY difficult to remember that all the nastiness being sent your way is really the result of the twisty bits in old people's brains. The forty-eighth time someone calls you a rancid donkey carcass with maggots where your brain should be Alzheimer's starts to sound a lot like an excuse. The lady that came up with that gem couldn't remember what cheese is called for christ's sake.

3. Other nurses.
Remember my two blogs about my class? Get a good mental picture of the stupid girl. Now, give her a massive sense of entitlement, an inferiority complex and 10 years of experience, just enough to forget what it was like ever being new and lose all the knowledge she gained in school and replace it with bad habits and antiquated techniques. Multiply by twenty, add some mean spirited gossip and backstabbing and you have a nursing floor. Worst of all the second a nurse turns 40 she gets the nursing haircut (the one that looks like someone was cutting hair with a weedwacker) so they all look alike. A bunch of scary, mean twins. It's like a Steven King movie.

4. Patients.
When my little sister was three she got her ears operated on. She went to the hospital, got to eat some popsicles and had to take medicine that made her all dizzy. She weighed a whopping 40 ish pounds (I think) and I'll bet you she was as nice as pie. That is what patients in hospitals USED to be like. Patients now are only in the hospital if they are siiiiiiiiiiick. Apendectomy? You can go home the same day. Bowel resection? A couple days. But a 54 year old smoker that weighs 650 pounds, doesn't have enough upper body strength to turn themselves over in bed and has laid in one place for so long they have a bedsore the size of Texas? Welcome! Our hospital is your home. For the record, trying to turn a patient that size over is like going cow tipping, except you aren't allowed to be drunk.

5. Monotony.
You don't get to yell "STAT!!" Doctors yell. You hand them shit. And hang IVs. And change dressings. Anytime you switch areas it's cool for awhile, and then its the same old same old. Work is usually either boring or soul crushingly terrifying and they don't let you take home samples of the good drugs. While its a big step above the old days, when nurses scrubbed floors on their hands and knees.....sometimes I still want to yell things and cut.

So, I don't think that any of you that read this actually want to be nurses. But if you know anyone that does, please, for their own sake, save their innocent souls. No one deserves to be shit on.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Feminism for Dipshits

You may think there are stupid people in your class. They probably make inane comments all the time, manage to offend someone every time they talk and just generally annoy everyone so much that it's a wonder they haven't been choked with a live salmon or drowned in their own coffee mug yet. You think that you can rightly assume that this person is one of the more challenged people in the world. Everyone thinks this, everyone assumes that the kid everyone throws mental daggers at in their class is one of the worst out there.

You're wrong. You are all wrong.

The stupidest people in the the world are not in your classes, no matter what class you are in. I know this because I have come to the conclusion that people that possess serious, mind numbing, make you want to chew off your own arm and throw a tonic-clonic seizure just so that they'll stop talking stupidity, are not allowed to enter random programs willy-nilly. They are systematically searched out, rounded up and convinced that they want to be nurses. And then sent to Kamloops to become major players in my own personal version of hell.

Today we had a class in feminism. For nursing this is an important concept. It goes way beyond being the reason that we no longer wear short skirts and little starched caps on our perfectly combed-back hair. Feminism is why we no longer have to stand when doctors enter the room and give up our chairs to them. It's why we actually learn about physiology and pharmacology in school rather than JUST the best way to dust door frames and the fastest way to turn hospital corners when making a bed. Feminist nurses were the driving force behind the shift from thinking of hospitals as places where good behaviour was forced on patients to places where people made their own choices and got well.

It's pretty darn major and, I thought, pretty basic. I knew all of this before I got into nursing. I consider myself a feminist in an understated kind of way, I think that in an ideal world everyone would be equal and that helping women and men reach equality is a good place to start. Sometimes I'm pretty naive but I sort of thought that in nursing, a career dominated by women, feminism would be a pretty well universally accepted concept.

Not so my friends, not so at all.

You've all been introduced to my class in earlier posts. My favorite friend ever was super duper active in discussion today. Here are a few of the gems of knowledge that jumped from her peanut sized brain to the wide world:

"If everyone was a feminist then everyone would hate men and be gay, and then where would we get kids?"

"I think we need to embrace people with traditional beliefs. So my dad thinks women belong in the kitchen, I do too and I don't see anything wrong with that. Why are we punishing people for acting the way they should"

"I think it makes sense that men have more power in the world, they're more logical and women are so emotional we need people to lead us."

Last week I said she took me back to the 50's and I could hear the martini shaker in her voice as she mentally prepared the perfect dinner while awaiting the coming of her strong manly man. I take it back. Did I say 50's? Try 1910. She might as well be wearing bloomers and carrying around a bottle of smelling salts for when her corsets get too tight and she faints.

I'm surprised that our teacher, a wonderful, opinionated feminist theory professor didn't kick her out. I guess she has a level of tolerance I'll never have.

The worst part of this day wasn't the really, really stupid girl though. She's so over the top that it just makes me laugh and wonder how on earth she ever wrote an essay with enough 2 syllable words in it to get into the nursing program. The worst part was that, with the exception of me, one guy and two or three other girls, everyone else in the class seemed to agree with the basic ideas that she was expounding. This university is letting out a class full of people that think all feminists are gay, all homosexuals are slightly less than human and a woman's place really is to follow the big strong man she pledged allegiance to the day she got hitched.

I want out.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

The Coolest Kids in the Bar

There are some things I hate about Kamloops. I hate that it snows but never stays snowy, just melts and then freezes into sheets of death on every flat surface. I hate that people think driving their stupid muscles cars and yelling out the windows is a normal social interaction. I hate that any bar you go to you will DEFINITLY hear the Pussycat Dolls, probably at least 3 times.

But I love that you can go to the bar in costume and not only will people find it normal.....you actually get rewarded for it. Here's the story:

My friend B and I have a full blown obession centered around the TV show "How I Met Your Mother" and in particular Neil Patrick Harris' character Barney Stinson. I didn't have too many giggely girl crushes in high school, so I make up for it now by doodling "Lisa Patrick Harris" on my notebooks in leadership class. You can laugh but I know that someone who makes up a third of this blog's readership is a full blown Battlestar Galactica addict. I'm much cooler than that. But yes, focusing. Anyhow, we made t-shirts
You'll notice we didn't stop at t-shirts. We went a little crazy. And then we got a little drunk. It's been a long time since I've been drunk and I think my body is punishing me for Ottawa.....cause I am now officially the worlds cheapest drunk. Remember that mug of gin? That would now kill me. I was a little sloppy by the time we left home and I guess I went about being super friendly at the bar. I explained our shirts to eeeeeveryone. I remember trying to talk the coat check girl into checking two coats for the price of one. Trying to convince the bouncer that he, too, should become a HIMYM addict. Shaking off some old guy who claimed to be 20, looked like he'd grown up with a vice clamped around his forhead and kept trying to hold my hand. And, of course, dancing like a flaming tard. B got in trouble for wearing sunglasses on the dance floor (who knew that was a rule), we played a supremely untalented game of pool and did some sort of shot that combined whisky and banana liquer. And then, in a ThePeach inspired moment my liver suddenly realized what it was being asked to process and demanded that it be taken home immediatly.

During the night I had sort of been operating under the impression that no one was really noticing our antics/costumes/stumbly drunkness because there were so many girls wearing napkins as dresses and grinding on the stage to look at instead. I guess not. After getting our coats, as we were about to walk out the door the coat check girl stopped us. We walked back over to the little coat window and she handed us a pink gift bag and said "I have to give this to someone. You guys are cool. So here you go."

I have now officially been given positive reinforcement for going to the bar dressed like a bag lady from the eighties. This positive reinforcement comes in the the form of:
-two sets of dirty dice
-two spin the bottle buttons
-a chocolate heart
-a teddy bear that I have now given to my roomates dog
-about 20,000 sickly pink suckers and
-a bag of heart gem stickers

In retrospect it might not have been all that amazing. But, being slightly tipsy, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I proceeded to drunk dial everyone who's numbers I could dial by memory and leave rambling voicemails about how stellarly cool B and I were. The taxi driver just kept shaking his head and I think he was laughing at me, cause at one point all I could see was his turban shaking in that distinctive way everyone shakes when they are trying very hard not to laugh at idiots. After that point the night is a blur of leftover sushi, chocolate and staring dumbly at episodes of Friends.

But hey, this is why I (sometimes) love Kamloops. Sometimes, for no reason except a crazy t-shirt, you become the coolest kid at the bar.

Friday, February 6, 2009

The 80's stage a hostile takeover

My house has become the 80's, as invisioned by people who lived 1 year of their lives in the 80's.

My roomate's friends are in their final year of nursing, and they are all finishing up for the year. After a hard year of learning how to bedbath and discussing deep thoughts (like, really, how do you even KNOW if someone needs gravol, like, emotionally?) they are ready to let loose and party. At my house.

I was okay with this when I was first told. That's because in my world parties work like this:
1. Buy beer/gin
2. Drink beer/ pour gin into bucket and drink
3. Leave

Not in the world of nurses. I worked a night shift last night and woke up at 10 this morning, after 2 delicious and inadequate hours of sleep to loud pumping VERY bad hip-hop music and alot of people blowing up balloons in my kitchen. Now my whole house looks like a cross between an 8 year old's birthday party (but not in the Laos sense) and an explosion at a flourescent paint factory. Every time I open my door I get hit in the head with a Blondie poster. So that's nice.

I remember having theme parties in my last apartment. They were fun. This is not. My roomate has called me 2 times a day for the past week so that I can tell her if she can wear flourescent green fishnets AND a pink tank top....or is that too much. Eventually I just started to tell her my cell battery was dying. My computer suddenly has a lot of really bad 80's music on it because, in a moment of weakness, I told her she could download stuff for the party. "Like a virgin" keeps working itself into my playlist, like a parasite.

I am working out a plan so I don't have to be here tonight. Maybe I'll work another night shift.....hospice sounds like more fun than this.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

No one can know

No one in Kamloops can know I have this blog.

Actually, that's a little dramatic. No one I go to school with can know. Because I am about to rant endlessly about every single person in my class and, even though I don't really like any of them, it's more pleasant to be in class if everyone doesn't hate you. And this is nursing school. Which means that all social interactions can be 100% accuratly predicted. Whatever a class full of 15 year old girls would do is exactly what will happen.

Example #1.
Student A slept with Student B's ex. One more time, that word was EX. Student B proceeded to recruit a posse and whip them into a tizzy of A hatred. They then refused to sit on the same side of the classroom as A, pinned spiteful little notes to her back and later on got drunk, drove by her place a bunch of times in a row and then egged her car.

I love nursing school.

I have a new favorite classmate though. She never fails to say things in class that make me wonder when EXACTLY someone invented a time machine and took us back to the time when women's magazines all included a recipe for cheese balls with olives and 101 ways to say "I have a headache" to your husband so he'd leave you alone in the bedroom. Here a few of the gems:

"Where are their husbands. I mean, I know the gays have a place in society, but these women need a man around."

"Well, of course tall men are always leaders. They're stonger than women and we need leaders that can protect us and hunt and fish and stuff."

"I think first nations people should be cut off from welfare if they start drinking. I don't want my tax dollars to support bums."

I'm glad she said first nations. It would be sad if nursing students weren't able to be politically correct.