Nurse Ratched’s Place

Check out this nurse’s crystal ball. Nurse Sue Whittier has a dilemma. Should she tell her dying former sweetheart the truth about his scheming wife? Apparently, the evil wife is having an affair, and the other man is the father of her son. Hmmm, decisions, decisions. May I suggest that she just go kick the wife’s butt and be done with it, or is that too un-nurse like for me to say? I guess she’ll just have to gaze into her crystal ball to find the answers to her problems. She also needs to stop pining over her old flame. Nurse Whittier, get a life. He’s married and he’s dying, so get over it. Yes, I’m feeling rather cranky today. I looked into my own crystal ball and I don’t like what I see. America has a growing dilemma. It’s our health care system. The dilemma has to do with the Baby Boomers who will one day overwhelm the health care system.

We geezers are growing older, and as we age, we start outliving our usefulness to the insurance industry. The cost of our health care goes up, and we all know how happy insurance companies are when we ask them to pay our bills. And who can blame them. Health care is expensive, and what good are old people anyway? We just take up valuable space. My crystal ball showed me that the insurance industry is going to solve this dilemma. One day, when you least expect it, the insurance companies will get Congress to pass a law that will legalize assisted suicide in our country.

Science fiction writers have already figured this out. Do you remember a movie called Soylent Green? The movie takes place in the future. It is a dismal time when there are too many people on the planet, and there isn’t enough food, water, and housing to go around. There’s a scene in the movie where an old geezer, played by Edward G. Robinson, just can’t take it anymore, so he goes to an euthanasia clinic and is put out of his misery. The scene was disturbing, but I’m sure that his HMO was happy because they didn’t have to pay his expenses anymore. I’m positive that they preauthorized his extermination. I bet you’re thinking, “Life is sacred and this will never happen in America.” I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with you. In the view of the insurance industry, life is sacred as long as it’s not too expensive to keep someone around.

Here’s my suggestion for their future slogan: Say yes to death.

I’ve always said; if you want to play the damsel in distress card, tell people that you are a nurse.

My 4th of July literally started off with a bang when my back rear tire exploded while I was driving to work. I was on a busy two-lane highway traveling 60 miles an hour when I ran over a nail. Damn nail! The car swerved into oncoming traffic, but I was able to get the car under control, and coasted to the side of the road. I kept my cool until the car stopped, and then I freaked out. Unlike the rest the of civilized world, I don’t own a cell phone, so I was basically screwed. After I calmed down, I decided it was best to keep limping down the side of the road on my rim and look for help.

Less than a mile down the road I saw a big white farmhouse with rows of pickup trucks appointed with gun racks parked in the front yard. I noticed a group of men mulling around a barbeque grill, so I pulled off the road into the driveway and walked up to the gathering of good old boys who were guzzling their 4th of July beer. I had a feeling this was going to be my lucky day.

Me: “Good afternoon gentlemen. I’m sorry to intrude on your party, but I’m a nurse going to Hospital X, and I have a flat tire.” I smiled while pointing to my hospital ID that I was wearing on my sweater and I said, “Can one of you gentlemen help me out?”

Good Old Boy #1: “Shoot little lady, you’re a nurse?” Everyone jumped to their feet. “We’ll be glad to help you out. Come on guys. Someone throw me another can of beer and let’s go!”

While I was standing around watching my newly acquired pit crew of slightly tipsy men change my tire, Good Old Boy #2 brought me a hot dog off the grill and a diet soda. He apologized for not bringing me a beer, but he said he knew I couldn’t drink because I was going to work. He said that he and his wife really appreciate the nursing care they always receive at Hospital X, and that he and his friends were really happy that they could help out a nurse. The good old boys changed my tire in less than twenty minutes, and I was back on the road again.

I’m writing this post from my Toyota dealership while I wait for my new tire to be mounted on the car. The old tire is DOA. I’ve gotten the word that buying a new tire is going to be an expensive proposition. Too bad the Toyota mechanic wasn’t at yesterday’s picnic, because everyone, especially drunken good old boys, love nurses.

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!