Yaeli's Blog

You might be a nurse if...

I received a newsletter from work the other day and in it was this great "You might be a nurse if..." list. I knew I just had to share it, especially when I realised that I do or have encountered everything on the list. :o)You might be a nurse if...

• when using a public restroom, you wash your hands with soap for a full minute and then turn off the faucets with your elbows.
• your favourite dream is the one where you leave a mess by a patient's bedside and tell a doctor to clean it up.
• men assume you must be great in bed because of the nine billion porn movies about nurses.
• everyone, including complete strangers, tells you about each and every ache and pain they have.
• you want to put your foot through the TV screen every time you see a nurse on a soap opera doing nothing but talking on the phone and flirting with the doctors.
• you can almost see the germs on doorknobs and telephones.
• you can watch the goriest movie and eat anything afterwards, even spaghetti with lots of tomato sauce.
• you use a plastic 30cc medicine cup as a shot glass.

Yep, I'm definitely a nurse.

On another note, prac sucks. Once again (for the 4th clinical term in 2 years) I have been put into aged care rehab. I thought I'd paid my penance after the first 3 clinical terms in aged care and working in a nursing home for 18 months. But obviously not. Someone, somewhere must really hate me. It's not really that I hate the oldies, most of them are very sweet people, it's just that working on rehab doesn't allow for the passing criteria (set out by the uni) to be met. On rehab all you do is wipe bums, shower people, go for walks and make cups of tea. There is no opportunity to run IV fluids or blood transfusions (if the patient needs those things then they shouldn't be in rehab), no opportunity for perfoming dressings on IV lines and sites (all IV cannulas are generally removed before the patient comes to rehab), and no opportunity (on this ward) to care for a patient that requires additional infection control precautions. The only criterion that I am able to fulfil on this ward is bowel management, and I am sick of looking at people's arses!!!

Craig and I are desperately trying to think of games to keep us amused on the ward. So far we have come up with the word of the day game where you have to use a special word with all the patients (yesterday's word was fuckmook), and we have ascertained that if you were wanting to hang yourself from boredom on the ward, latex gloves would not be the most efficient method... It'd be kinda like trying to hang yourself with a bungee cord.

If anyone else has other ideas for "on the ward" entertainment, please let me know.

Only 3 more days of crappy old people to go.

posted by Olyal @ 11:45 am