You Can Be An Emergency Nurse, Too!

How would I look in this uniform? Wonderful, if I was seven feet tall with the proportions of Barbie. Bruck's Nurses Outfitting Company also made the old nurses' capes. I checked to see if they were still in business but found nothing. Check out the $5.95 price tag! LOL! What was the nursing salary back then? One hundred dollars a month? I wonder what the nurses of the 1940s would think if they could see us now in our SpongeBob Squarepants and Betty Boop scrubs. Not that I wear those. Okay, I do pull out my "SpongeBob ScaredyPants" scrub top for Halloween and my Peanuts Baseball print in the Spring. I also have a Nurse Tweety Bird top with Tweety in a nurses' cap. I always thought Tweety was a guy!

For those of you interested in changing your career or working in a new specialty, you can be an ER nurse, too! In this exciting specialty you can:

• Have a verbally abusive 80-year-old flip you off behind your back as you gently guide his companion to a room. You will know about it from the ten people at the nursing station who witnessed it. You will have no clue what you did that prompted the gesture.

• Confirm the physiological link between pulmonary edema and the need for a bowel movement. Oxygen can't wait. Neither will stool. You'll learn to slap on the non-rebreather on the face and get ready to put the bedpan under the other end.

• Get smacked on the arm by a confused 102-year-old who does not appreciate the necessity for a blood pressure. Then again, that may be appropriate behavior for a 102- year-old who is spunky enough to protest a BP.
  

• Play the "pain is what the patient says it is" game with repeat migraine patients as they lay totally relaxed, speech slurred after a trillion milligrams of Narcotic-of-Choice by IV, but their pain is still at a 9.9 out of 10 on a 0-10 scale. They know they are playing the system and you know they are playing the system and they know-that-you-know and you know-that-they-know-you-know.

• Interact with a man who will not acknowledge women. He will not look at them and lord knows he will not talk to them. You'll wonder if it is a cultural issue, but then you will realize it is an obnoxiousness issue.
  

• Watch as a parent sweeps their infant off the gurney to the other side of the room because there is NO WAY IN HELL that you are going to take a RECTAL TEMPERATURE on their child. You pervert.

• Deal with Dr. Snailspace by realizing that the harder you push to mobilize patients the slower the doctor will move. Deliberately. Run interference with said patients as they express their frustrations at you, the nurse. No one ever yells at "The Doctor".

• Answer phone calls from potential patients who want to know how busy your ER is at that moment. Realize that anyone who can shop-by-phone for the ER with the shortest waiting time doesn't really need to be in an ER at all.

• Learn that when a particular surgeon writes for everything to be done "STAT" on his appendectomy patient has no intention on taking that patient to surgery until the next morning. Learn this by letting the surgeon know the patient is "ready" after running for 90 minutes to get everything done "STAT" as ordered.

• Realize that enemas are more of an emergency department function than you would have thought. Learn to be assertive as you let your internet-surfing-laid-back colleague know that he is expected to do the next one.

The stories you have just read are true. Just about everything has been changed to protect the innocent. But you get the picture.