With a new class of students on the horizon and a new hospital to take them to; I have my nasty people worries welling up within me. Will the mean old man doctor be there? The one who gets mad if you sit in his chair (never saw his name on it) or the one that is so tall he can’t help but look down his nose at everyone and scare any intelligent answer right out the window.
And then there is the eerie green reflection of the monitors in the DOU unit (Definitive observation Unit) into the glasses of the secretary ward clerk who has had her big butt in the same seat for 20 years and treats everyone as if she was the Queen of England. She even talks to everyone about herself in the third person… Beverly wants you to know “If you can’t get the monitor on correctly, then don’t try!” The first time she reprimanded my nursing students who have more education in their toes than she has in all lobes of her cranium; I thought, “Who is this Beverly? Some doctor…cardiologist, or who?…guess what? That Beverly was HER! Imagine, I expected her to begin the royal wave!”
As a nursing student…and their professor, you get very thick skin. Or at least you try to. (I got practice as a school board member) Somehow most of the health care workers treat students like the door mats of the hospital, and expect them to bow and scrape. I have to tell the students to remember how it feels and in 20 years when they are in charge, "be kind to the students."
It has been said that Nurses eat their young, but these days there is very little left to much-upon after the health care populace gets at them.
I try to prepare my kids, (they are really young and mostly inocent I become a protective tiger mom while I have them in my class.) One particularly difficult day as we sat discussing our patients before we left the hospital for the day(behind closed doors). Several were concerned about the cool reception and mean comments made by the staff. I said, “Don’t think if someone acts nasty or mean it’s you. It could be something has gone wrong in their life. Like the doctor who has a wife who just left him, or the nurse who has a sick cat, or maybe even, I don’t know something like her dog died the night before. If it’s you or something you did, I’ll let you know, and try to help, so don’t worry about the crusty looks you’ve been getting.
About a week later one of the more shy girls pulled me aside and said, “I know what’s wrong with that one really mean nurse.” “Oh, you do?” I said, thinking she had some special insight. “Yes,” she said with a sly smile. “I figure she owns a kennel, and has lots of dogs, and every night one dies.” She turned away with a special spring in her step. And I thought, “Ya know, maybe she’s right.”
On one vacation we had so many car problems I lost weight running down the road to the service station looking for parts to repair our trusty (or untrusted) station wagon. So when I usually gain weight in a vacation, this is one of the few where I lost weight. And beside that at the end of the trip we were towed backwards through the Mojave Desert while all seven of us were still sitting in the car….the older kids wanted to put paper bags on their heads they were so embarrassed, but they all admit we saw the most amazing sunset, which we would never have seen if we were driving and all facing in the other direction. I have found, it depends on your point of view, or where or how you view a situation that will determine if you find it positive or negative. So if all seems lost and you are full of despair, get up and change how you look at what you have lost, and you may discover it’s not so bad…easy for me to say.
One day soon I’ll talk about my seven years of badbadbad luck…or more accurately, no luck at all.
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