Nurse Ratched’s Place

Wow, I want what she’s on. Doesn’t she look perky? Maybe she’s had too much caffeine, or maybe she’s in a good mood because it’s the 4th of July. She looks as American as apple pie in her costume, and the feathers in her cap are a nice touch. It’s hard to be glum during a national holiday.

I’ve been reading some really great nursing websites today, so I’m feeling upbeat, too. The Nursing Voices Forum is off to a great start. There’s a lot going on over there, so check it out. Kim at Emergiblog is hosting the next Change of Shift on Nursing Jobs. org blog. She got the idea from Pixel Nurse who hosted the last Change of Shift on Nursing Link. Kim said that she has no trouble giving credit where it is due or stealing great ideas!

Well, I better go now. I’m working today and I’m expecting a lot of holiday traffic on our unit. Happy 4th of July!

Norman Rockwell got it right in this picture. People love to gossip. Nurses love to gossip, too, even about the petty stuff, so I can just imagine what nurses at Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland are saying after they learned about the shenanigans of one of their foreign born doctors. It seems as though one of their Iraqi doctors, who is now being treated for burns at the hospital, was the man who tried to blow up the Glasgow airport.

I wonder if the nurses are fighting over who is going to take him as a patient. I ordinarily hate floating to other units, but I’d make an exception in this case. I’d love to be this guy’s nurse. The Florence Nightingale Pledge be damned, I’d have such fun torching the douche bag. I can see it now:

“Good Morning Mr. Terrorist. I’m your nurse, Mother Jones, RN. My, those burns look painful. Were those the kind of burns that you were trying to inflict on other people? Time to debride those burns. Let me rip those bandages off for you.”

You get the picture. I’d be having way too much fun.

I wonder how all of this is going to affect the foreign born doctors at our hospital. The FBI came to our hospital right after 9/11, and wanted to know about the doctors who built a Mosque across the street from our facility. The doctors wanted a place to pray while they were at work. These guys aren’t terrorists, but now I wonder if this incident is going to bring the FBI back for another visit.

I look for the positive in every situation. Perhaps this situation will prompt some of our foreign born doctors to start treading a little more lightly around the nurses station, and stop acting like jerks.

Look at that nurse. She looks so patriotic. I’d bet if her you asked her, she would tell you she is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I love the flag that she’s draped in, and I especially like her cap. I give her cap at 10/10 on the Emergiblog Cap Scale. She’s dressed and ready for work. It looks like the 4th of July is her favorite holiday.

City Hall, Morning Sun, Iowa

My favorite holiday is the 4th of July, too. Independence Day is steeped in tradition. When I was a little girl spending my summers in Morning Sun, Iowa, my grandparents took me into town so I could participate in the local 4th of July festivities. We watched the annual tractor pulling competition, the Independence Day cakewalk, the greased pig contest, and of course I got to take a spin on the kiddy rides that were setup in front of City Hall. There was a horse show later in the evening followed by fireworks, and homemade cherry pie topped with vanilla ice cream. It was heaven on earth.

The 4th of July came with new traditions when I started working as a psychiatric nurse. The other nurses and I bring in fried chicken, watermelon, pies, and ice cream for our patients. We also brace ourselves for the surge of psychotic patients who traditionally flood into the unit when firecrackers start popping, and the fireworks start going off in the nighttime sky. My patients really think that the sky is falling and that the world is coming to an end. And God help us if a psychotic person has a few beers while watching Will Smith in Independence Day. They come running in believing that the aliens are out to get them. Damn aliens. They really know how to kill a holiday.

Giving a lot of Haldol is another 4th of July tradition. It’s a psychiatric nurse’s holiday drug of choice.

This post is for Geena from Code Blog because she isn’t old enough to recognize this girl . Do you remember this girl’s name? She’s an actress named Peggy Lipton, and she played Julie Barnes on the Mod Squad. She ran around with two mod guys while solving crimes and saving the world. It was all about peace, love, and doing the right thing. Peggy was the definition of cool. Every girl in my school wanted to be just like Peggy. We wore short skirts, grew our hair long, and begged our parents to let us wear makeup and bleach our hair. Few of us made it to mod status. I know I didn’t make the grade. It just wasn’t meant to be.

I wonder what mod nurses looked like in the 1960s. I know that they cared about their patients. I’ve seen some pictures from back then. Nurses wore short dresses, and I don’t know how they were able to bend over and make a bed without their undies showing. They wore caps and dreamed of marrying doctors.

Here’s a mod looking nurse. She’s off duty so she’s not wearing her mini nursing uniform. Our mod nurse was just doing her own thing, and then she fell in love. She’s dreaming about marrying a doctor.

“When Jacqueline Clarke came from France to nurse at a Yorkshire hospital she had never known any Englishmen except her father. Soon she was to meet two very attractive ones; her farmer-cousin Guy, who ruled over his broad acres from a centuries-old farmhouse, and the distinguished surgeon of whom nurses spoke in awed whispers as “the great Mr. Broderick.”

Guy fell in love and started proposing marriage almost at once, while she wasn’t supposed even to speak to Mr. Broderick — and what a sensation there was when she did! She couldn’t presume to imagine that he would ever give her a serious thought…and yet the idea of him seemed to come persistently between her and Guy.”

I giggled when I read the back about the “great Mr. Broderick.” I guess he was trying to be cool by not insisting that the nurses call him doctor. That’s him looking cool on the bookcover. Look closely at the picture. Is he smoking a joint? I think he looks a little stoned. That’s another thing I remember about the 1960s, but that’s another story.

Today’s nurses have a few thing in common with nurses from the 1960s. We want the best for our patients. It’s still all about wanting to do the right thing.

Groovy!

I like this nurse’s laptop computer. I wonder if it’s a Mac. Change of Shift is up over at NursingLink. Go check it out.

This is a cartoon from a book that I bought at my local thrift store for 10 cents. Yep, I’m a big spender. The title of the book is, Nursing in Today’s World: Challenges, Issues, and Trends by Janice R. Ellis and Celia L. Hartley. It’s the fourth edition, and it was published in 1992. I bought the book because I liked the pictures. Take this example for instance. This is what I look like when I can’t sleep because I’m stressed out about work. I want to give good patient care, but it’s getting harder to do everyday. Nurses are asked to do more with less time, less staff, and less money.

When did things start going wrong? I was working at a hospital in the Midwest when HMOs came out. I noticed a red dot on the side of a few of the charts, and I asked what the red dots meant. My nursing manager explained that those charts belonged to patients that were members of a new HMO, and it was our job to get those patients out of the hospital ASAP so the hospital could make more money. I was shocked. Back then, saying something like that was blasphemy, but now it’s standard operating procedure. It’s no secret; the health care system is more focused on making a profit than it is on delivering good patient care.

I know that I am going to offend some people by saying this, but I don’t understand how nursing mangers can do their job within today’s profit driven health care system. I’m not suggesting that every manager is in a league with Satan, far from it, but I’ve known a few mangers over the years that have sold their soul to the devil. Look at the unit manager in the cartoon. She looks like she’s sleeping well at night, yet she’s telling the staff nurse that her first priority must be cost containment. I don’t remember cost containment being mentioned in the Florence Nightingale Pledge. The patient is always the nurse’s first priority. Good nurse mangers stand up for their staff and patients. They burnout quickly because their job eats away at them. The bad managers sell out and they seem to stick around forever.

I have no room in my nursing practice for sellouts.

I about peed my britches when I read my email this morning. This is from my mother. I just had to pass it along.

Sometimes, hearing voices is a good thing. No, I’m not talking about auditory hallucinations. I’m talking about a great new nursing forum called Nursing Voices: Nursing Talk From Around the World, and we need to hear your voice.

Nursing Voices has been around for the last couple of years as a small syndicated website for nurse bloggers, but now it has blossomed into a full-fledged nursing forum. The good people at Nursing Jobs.org are the creators of Nursing Voices. I’ll admit it, I’m new to nursing forums and I’m not a computer geek, but this forum is so user friendly, even I can figure out how to use its uncluttered format. There is something for everyone at Nursing Voices. Did you have a bad day at work, or did you see something that made you laugh so hard that you nearly peed your pants? Tell us what happened. Are you a student nurse who is ready to graduate or throw in the towel? Tells us what’s on your mind. Are you a male nurse? Gentlemen, this forum is for you. Tell the ladies what you’re thinking about. Nursing Voices is for everyone.

Come join the fun. We’re waiting for YOU!

I swear, I’m not doing this on purpose. Really! I overheard another conversation that was quite amusing. The guy in the picture looks like he’s having fun. Maybe I’ll take up eavesdropping as my new hobby because I’m hearing some pretty amazing things.

I was reading a magazine while sitting in my local community library when I overheard three young women chatting about their upcoming college classes, and what they wanted to do when they graduated from school. One young woman told the other two that she use to be a school teacher, but now she wanted to be a nurse. She explained her interest in nursing was based on its job security, and that she plans to use her nursing degree in conjunction with her background in teaching to springboard her career to new heights. She said that nursing school is going to be “a snap,” and that anyone who can read a textbook can become a nurse. I could hardly contain my laughter when I heard this woman make such a naive statement, and I ducked my head behind the magazine so they could not see the expression on my face.

I talked to one of my girlfriends later that night who use to be a clinical nursing instructor at the college. She and I had a good chuckle. My friend doubts that the woman will make it through her nursing classes. I think our new fledgling is in for a rude shock.

Here’s some advice. Don’t enter nursing unless you want to help people. Job security isn’t all its cracked up to be if you hate your job.

Max Ernst: Men will know nothing of this, 1923. Oil on canvas, London, Tate Gallery.

Sigmund Freud said, “Visual thought is closer to the unconscious event than verbal thought, it is older than the latter.” If that’s true, I wonder what Max Ernst was thinking when he created this work of art. Ernst was a self-taught painter and an artist in the Dada Movement. He believed that nothing made sense so he was against everything. You might say that Ernst was a rebel with a paintbrush. Ernst was interested at an early stage in the artistic creations of the mentally ill. He served in the First World War, and was deeply affected by his experiences during the war.

I learn a lot about my patients by looking at their artwork. Stop and take the time to look at your patients’ drawings the next time they bring them to the nurses station.