Would you like fries with that order?

So, you are probably wondering why I never talk about work, (or Wurk, as Loz, my favorite death match superstar IP lawyer and friend in Sydney, Australia, has dubbed it).

1) I like my job, and I like being a nurse, but I like to come home, forget about work, and hug my dog and contemplate stuff like why they don't make kids study Latin anymore, because declensions are cool, man, or if Kant was really right about time and space being the two a priori conditions of all human understanding and, hey(!), who's gonna win The Amazing Race, the snippy gay couple or the token black engaged couple? (Oh no! Mass media alert! But wait! I can explain! It's all Ibrahim's fault for sucking me in. Actually, we both work evening shifts, and come home wired but tired, and syndicated reruns of The Amazing Race has become our wind-down programming of choice. Oh no. We are officially The Couple Who Watches T.V. All Night Instead of Talking to One Another.)

(Actually, the latent theology student in me aches to deconstruct and critique the latent Orientalism inherent in exploiting indigenous cultures for nothing more than the commerical, self entitled and no-doubt nefarious purposes of a fucking gameshow, not to mention the spending of million of dollars in pursuit of said goals. Money that could have been allocated towards something altruistic and meaningful, like international medical relief or funding literacy programs for tots so that instead of kicking and screaming in the middle of your local Barnes and Noble about wanting this that and the other thing RIGHT NOW MOMMY they would actually shut the fuck up and read already, and stop disturbing the other nice, childless patrons in the shop.)

I digress.

2) An addendum to number one above. Okay, seriously, some days my job isn't all that. Can you believe it? No really. I know you're thinking nursing is all fast-talking ER sexiness and drama (sexiness and drama that has totally gone off in the last say, five seasons, but whatever). Or maybe you're not.

Still.

Newsflash: not that we wouldn't love to have a glamorous job as portrayed in those glossy, souped-up t.v. versions of hospital life (too bad doctors don't universally look like Goran Visjinc, while we're at it). I'd wager we nurses would love it if every day at Hospital Soup Land [insert name of regional community hospital here] was full of Redeeming Moments, Last Minute Saves, and Morality Plays That Work Out Alright in the End, So Group Hug, Kids! (Okay, so there's usually at least .0004% of something that happens on even the worst day in the nursing that Make It Alright, Yo. And that .0004% = cold hard cash paid out bimonthly in the form of our paychecks).

But folks, seriously. The reality is that inspite of all myriad of misconceptions related to our profession, it seems sometimes like we spend most of our days cleaning up poop (literally and figuratively) and making sure Mr. Two- Hours-Post-Cardiac-Cath-Right-Groin--Six-French-Manual-Compression-Held-For-35-Minutes-With-Reducible-But-Oozing-Hematoma-Man doesn't decide to forgo his 6 hours of ordered bedrest and leave AMA, because QUOTE "the customer service here has been lousy!" at the same time we're making sure Mr. Small-Bowel-Obstruction-Guy doesn't pull out his NG tube and perforate/infarct his bowel for similar stated reasons.

I hate to say it, but somedays, nursing feels like 10% intellectual challenge, 90% glorified babysitting. (And if any nursing students are reading this blog, which they probably aren't, but just in case they are, replace the above with: NURSING IS A GREAT PROFESSION. WE NEED YOU, FOLKS! WE NURSES LOVE YOU. LOVE YOU. YOU ARE OUR FUTURE/RETIREMENT REPLACEMENTS, HEAR? SO HANG IN THERE! )

3) As it is the way of the world, some days you just can't walk away from work feeling like it was ultimately worth it to have spent EIGHT YEARS slave to post-secondary education (bitter?! who's bitter?!), four of them in graduate school, with a master degree in theology under your belt and a license to practice nursing, only to be called "the waitress" by your alert and oriented X3 youngish patient when you walk in the room. Or to have docs you've paged for a telemetry strip showing a six second pause/complete heart block grumble indifferently, "Yeah, I suppose so," when you politely ask if they are, indeed, the doc on call. Or surgery demands to know "why you've paged them" when they haven't come up to see your stable-but-needing-a-consult patient all day long and it's now nine o'clock in the evening and said patient is now threatening to leave AMA if she doesn't see someone stat, dammit. Or dietary never pages you back when half of the patients on your floor never got dinner trays. Or [insert maddening nursing conundrum here].

4) There's the whole bodily fluid thing. I'm used to talking about GI bleeds while eating oatmeal, but I've found most people don't consider chatting about bloody, foul smelling stool oozing continually per rectum, polite table talk. (Why on earth not?) Ergo, I've tried to keep the gore to a minimum on the blog.

5) And there's the whole HIPPA thing, which has basically made us deathly afraid (perhaps with good reason) to give a concerned family member their loved one's room number on our unit without a court-signed affadavit stating that the poor little eighty-nine-year-old on the phone really is Patient X's great-grandmother Edna.

Oh geez, I guess I did end up talking about Wurk this blog entry.