A Great Honor

One of the best parts of being a nurse is some of the people you get to meet and care for. I count it a particular honor to care for veterans, as I have the utmost respect for all- young and old.

A few days ago I recovered a gentleman who was a WWII vet and survivor of D-Day. I thanked him for his service and shook his hand.

"That must have been terrible", I said. He just shook his head and looked down. What could he say?

I'm always in awe when I'm around such a person. He's just a regular guy- no different from anyone else. Yet 60-something years ago he was a young man with a rifle, running like hell on a beach of death, hoping just to make it out alive.

How often I forget that for every minute I stand in this country, a hero has fallen in my place. Someone has paid the price for me, for America, for her freedom, and for her ideals.

If you are reading this and you have served our country past or present, I thank you.

Man Nurse

My great-grandma, bless her heart, always refers to me as a "Man Nurse".

"Are you still going to be a Man Nurse" she would always ask me while I was in school.

"Yeah Grandma, its the only kind they'll let me be"

She would reply with an approval because all those women need someone to help lift, people are just too darn heavy now.

I can't say my main motivation to take up nursing was to help other women lift stuff. What is it about nursing anyway- this reverse sexism thing?

There are male nurses but never female nurses.

I thought maybe the world was getting over that until I started working in the PACU. The first time I was in the locker room, I headed over to a rack of scrubs and found this:

Man Nurse = Man Pants. Now where is that Man Top.....

Changing My View

Recently I was going to be receiving a patient. 58 year old with Down's Syndrome, Alzheimer's, Personality Disorder, OCD, and a history of being combative.

Very quickly we decided not to recover this patient in the usual open PACU bays, but in one of our private rooms.

The patient is brought in, he is intubated, and while be for awhile. He is still completely out of it after receiving ketamine, midazolam, and anesthesia. He is 100% unresponsive. I settle in close by his side where I can monitor him and his airway. I chart away, thankful for a chance to do paperwork right away, but also with an ominous feeling that when this guy wakes up it will be with bravado. I have gloves, a syringe for the ETT, and suction on standby. His caregiver arrives, sits in a recliner and turns on the TV.

She is watching ABC's "The View".

Have mercy! Could there be any worse show on earth? It is torture. The slow, rhythmic, misty breaths coming from my patient's T-piece puff off as a time keeper. Each breath is chalk mark on my cell wall reminding me that this is going to be a long recovery. Anything has to be better than The View. I can't believe women watch this.

I feel like I'm sitting in the hen house listening to five old birds cluck. No words, just angry clucking....

You know You're a Male Nurse If....

You know you're a male nurse if......


...the "Personal Care Kit" (aka first aid/med cupboard) for the employees of your unit has more space dedicated to feminine hygiene products than anything else.

....there are pumping rooms for your co workers. And its not for pumping iron.