Nurse notes plus This and That

 It has been six months since I was hired as a new nurse, and as fascinating as that statement is, I still find it a bit surreal that I actually am a nurse.


Where I work now, until recently the nurses didn't even look like nurses. Our facility has a 'no scrubs' policy, so we wear business casual attire (no jeans or bikinis allowed). Recently, we have been given black vests with large, handy pockets. I think the patients were beginning to grumble that they didn't know a nurse from a housekeeper. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing, unless the patient began to drop their drawers in order to allow the maintenance man a better view of the boil on their buttocks.

So now, the scrub-ish looking vests set us apart from the rest of the staff. Not that I need to look like a nurse to feel like a nurse. I feel like a nurse when I'm frantically answering the call lights for pain pills. I feel like a nurse when Mr. Smith (name has been changed to protect his innocence and/or privacy) needs his dressing changed, which is saturated by bodily fluids with the appearance of (well, in the interest of those who may not be fascinated by wounds, I will abstain from the messy details.) I feel like a nurse when I begin learning to decipher the doctors dreadful handwriting. As an aside, I'm convinced that one of the required courses in medical school is Handwriting: If it's legible, you'll never be a doctor.

As I may have mentioned in a previous blog, it takes approximately a year before a new nurse begins to say to his or herself, "Hey, I know what I'm doing, the majority of the time!" Of course, there may be others that say to themselves far sooner than the one year mark, "Hey, I'm outta here!"
I really don't know where I'm going with this, but I felt the need to write it.

                               Our carpet looks nothing like this, and does not fly.

Magic carpet ride

As I write this, two men I just met today have taken over the second floor of our home. They are installing new carpet in the master bedroom and the stairway. The second floor is off limits for most of today.


In preparation for this takeover, I had to strategically plan what I needed to bring from the second floor to the first. If this had been a work day, I wouldn't even be here for the majority of the Big Carpet Event. But I'm off today, and so I had to prepare in advance what I needed to bring downstairs. You know, things I couldn't possibly live without for a whole day. There is a constant cacophony of hammering, slamming, crashing and the occasional cuss word. I made up the cussing part, but I think it adds a certain something, especially when I think of those two manly men upstairs wielding manly tools.

  
Baby it's cold outside

I decided to remove myself from the noise and excitement of the carpet installation, and place myself into the noise and excitement of the grocery store. Big mistake. It's twenty degrees outside. Yesterday it was forty-something. This January has been a strange one, as the temperatures keep see-sawing from warm to cold. I whined like a little girl as I exited my car and rushed into the store. Before shopping, I had to return approximately two tons of pop bottles and cans. What a monotonous chore, but I have only myself to blame for the massive amount of returns. I am hopelessly addicted to Pepsi Max (free plug for Pepsi, I suppose) and I go through far too much of the diet pop (some refer to it as soda; I call those people weird.) Actually, I have been a bad influence on my teenage son, who is also hooked on the stuff. We both realize that researchers will one day announce the deadly consequences of our actions. Until then, we sip in bliss.


There I go again, taking that imaginary writers fork in the road, testing the patience of even the kindest of my readers. Sigh.


I enter the store, grateful for the warmth, pausing briefly to wrench my bare hands from the frozen handle of a cart recently brought in by a brave teen.
I dig in my coat pocket for my scribbled list, knowing from experience that I will have at least 50 additional items in my cart that never even made the list. What can I say? Call it a lack of self control. I call it a serious sickness, the remedy of which is to abstain from grocery stores altogether. Which is my sneaking way of wriggling out of having to cook, and going out to eat (another favorite hobby of mine.) My poor family does not find this the least bit amusing, and so I continue to darken the doors of the neighborhood grocery stores, searching desperately for ingredients to throw together a menu that I haven't yet planned. How pathetic.

 This man is a good representation of our installers, Ken and Paul, but is neither one.

They're still at it

The carpet installers, I'll refer to them as Ken and Paul, because that's their names, are still going strong upstairs. They've been here six hours, and I don't know how much longer they'll be at it. They asked for water earlier, mumbling something about being thirsty, go figure. So my husband gave them bottled water. Little do they know I charge $5 a bottle. I may give them a discount if I approve the finished product. Laura....you're a jerk. 

I can't wait until they're done. Not only will we be able to admire the brand new carpet, (the ugly old crap-carpet a faded memory), but we'll finally have some peace and quiet around here again.


Which will come in handy as we plan our next move.


Figuring out how to pay for the bloody carpet.