ONE NURSE STORY

If there’s a typical nurse story, it sounds like this:

“I like to help people, and I don’t get grossed out.”

A typical nursing patient has a similar story:

“I need help, and I am grossed out.”

Why are we grossed out about our bodies?

I’ll start:

Take a good look at your left wrist bone and measure up your arm about three inches.

If you touch the blade of a blood thirsty chop saw to the skin, you might get grossed out.

It feels like a thump, not a slice, because the blade is an eighth of inch wide with hardened teeth.

So it’s more of a gash, a trough, than a nice knife line, and the white fat just under the skin comes pooching out like the lumpy goo in a vomiting squeeze toy.

 

 

I learned all about it from a nurse in the Good Samaritan emergency room.

She walked me through the anatomy while she prepped my arm for stitches.

“The right hand mutilates the left. If you cross your hands in front of a chop saw you’ll cut more than a piece of wood.”

“It was curved staves for a round wall.”

“And your arm.”

“And my arm.”

A man in a white lab coat lurched around the room on a thick-soled shoe making up for a short leg.

He carried a book.

I figured him for the janitor, or tech.

He was the ER doctor. His book? Texas Barbecue Secrets.

That’s my guy, but it was the nurse who ran the show.

Follow me for more woodworking tips.

 

One Nurse, Probably More

Who do you want looking after things but the most educated, most qualified, person in the room, the one who just might give a damn about things working out right.

That’s right, a team of nurses. More on this later.

 

A young woman knew she could help people in need if she found the right path forward.

She chose to start as a nurse’s aid in a nursing home where she learned that old people near death still held onto their hateful beliefs.

Who knew?

But that didn’t change her mind.

She worked with people near the end of life’s journey as she attended nursing school, putting her experience and education into practice every day.

One day the nursing school shut down on its students.

But that didn’t change her mind.

She made the grade and got the job she wanted to show how things can workout.

From elderly patients in nursing homes to the pace of an urban hospital delivery room, she lives the dream.

Along the way she made time to save her husband, which is a common theme among married people, except she’s a nurse and it took everything she had.

Her life is dedicated to those in need. To old people who’ve given up, she gave hope, along with the sort of attention they needed to avoid dying from a secondary infection.

To new babies she is their whole world from the beginning.

She is one nurse with a nurse story that’s just getting started.

The picture at the top is the crew from my chemo lounge.

I’d bragged that I was a big time blogger, a writer, a chronicler of our times, and I got dressed up and went in when Coping Magazine published my story.

They weren’t crazy about getting in a picture, but nurses do what nurses do.

They ran the show.

 

Dept of Education Secretary Professional Degree?

With heavyweight policy thinkers like Linda McMahon and Betsy DeVos running the show for the Department of Education, maybe eliminating graduate nursing from the list of ‘professional’ degrees makes more sense than they’re given credit for?

Nooooo.

 

Nursing’s exclusion is likely tied to historical categorization. Beginning in the 1960s, graduate nursing programs were treated as strictly academic (focused on post-licensure specialization or research) rather than as first-professional entry pathways. At that time, “first-professional” degrees were reserved for post-baccalaureate programs where the degree itself granted entry into professional practice or licensure.

But that historical view no longer reflects reality. Today, advanced nursing degrees are central to:

• Direct patient care and complex clinical decision-making

• Meeting growing primary care, behavioral health, and specialty care needs

• Leadership, education, and systems change within health care

Yet the regulatory definition has not caught up.

 

Here’s what is all caught up for those keeping score:

You can’t expect actionable data from those who can’t understand normal thinking.

But, you can expect them to do as they’re told.

Keep this in mind: In your hour of need, do you want those up to date on the most recent medical breakthroughs, or those nodding along with, “Shine a light up your ass?”

 

PS: The last thing you want disrupting any treatment and recovery is some quacky bullshit from non-medical people.

 

PSS: The first thing you want is the one nurse who calms the room down with their presence. If you’ve been in that room, you know how important it is.