Why I'm not a real nurse, and other tales of a crappy day.

To start with, I should explain the blog title I guess. A year or so ago I was at a home party to support one of my friends, also in attendance was the friend's MIL, who is, shall we say, nasty. After making snide comments about everyone as they left the room, MIL turns to me and says "and what do you do?" (Now, I am a nurse by training, but no longer work in a clinical setting, currently I do Data Analysis for a health management company, but that is is a little long to explain so I normally just say 'I'm a nurse.') So she the asks me, "which hospital do you work at?" And I say, "I don't work in a hospital any more I work for [health management company]." To which she makes the infamous reply, "Oh, so you're not a real nurse."

OK, back story out of the way, flash forward to last night. My grandmother fell at home in her garage and was taken to the local ER via EMS. My dad, who also works for the same EMS service, but was stationed in another house, wasn't able to get away so he calls me and asks if I will go up and sit with her until he can get there. So there I am in office clothes, sitting at my grandmother's bed side when she decides she needs to go to the bathroom. It's a small town ER, right after she got there a full arrest comes in, so guess where everyone in the ER is, Grandma's back hasn't even been cleared, she's still strapped to the backboard. I hit the call light and someone comes over and says "I'll be with you in a minute" not "What do you need" or "Are you OK?" So 15 min later, Grandma's really starting to squirm so I go out to the desk and ask if I can please have a bedpan, the lady huffs at me but stomps off to get it, I go on back in the room and start pulling on gloves, the lady comes back in, looks at me oddly, but lets me help her put Grandma on the bedpan. My Grandmother then explains to the lady that "[my granddaughter] is a nurse." Which, especially since I'm in my office clothes, gets me the hairy eyeball and "Which hospital do you work at?" Once again I'm forced to explain that "I no longer work in the hosp, etc, etc." Which garners the response, "Oh, so you're not a real nurse." If I hadn't been so tired at the time, I think I'd have wet myself laughing.

Well, thankfully last night Grandma was really just bumped, bruised and embarrassed so my dad and I got her home and got her settled. This morning however, I'd barely gotten to work when I got the call that she'd fallen again and was back up at the ER. Now she's admitted to the hosp and we're trying to figure out what to do for her safety. My crazy aunt is trying to convince us that 'Mom would have wanted us to take all her stuff while she's in the hospital.' I'm left with trying to herd cats while we try to get the family to make a decision.

As the icing on the cake of the truly crappy day, I had a coworker ask me a question that I wasn't fully paying attention to, and so didn't answer as clearly as I could have. As a result she did something that cause privacy concerns for one of our clients, and now she is having calls from the privacy office, and there is some question as to whether or not she will get to keep her job. I'm not her supervisor, and she's an adult, in fact has been a nurse nearly as long as I've been potty trained, and she should have known not to do what she did, but that doesn't stop me from feeling truly crappy that I may have inadvertently cost her her job.

So at any rate, now am waiting for hubby to get home, and after a quick dinner we are off to the hospital to discuss assisted living options with my Grandmother. Yeah me.

There's one in every office...

Or at least I think there is. That one person that nothing ever seems to stick to? The one in our office calls in sick at least 1 if not 2 days each week. She called in Thursday and Friday last week, actually showed up today and then "accidentally" double took her blood pressure medicine and had to rush to the ER. I swear if I did half the stupid things this woman does I'd be dead, or at a minimum unemployed.

Middle of the road

So, this political season I found this site that sends you though a series of questions to see how you compare to the candidates running for office. I took the quiz back before the primaries, and have just taken it again recently. Both times I came to the same basic conclusion, I am smack in the middle of the road. My political view can be summed up in the following phrase: leave me alone.

On one had, I truly believe (and a hat tip to Law Dog, here) that your guns are your guns. On the other hand, I believe that my womb is my womb, and the decisions to be made about it are between me, my husband and my God. Now before the 'pr.o-l.ifer's' get all in a tizzy, I don't like ab.ort.ion, I do not condone it, and wish it did not happen. However, I firmly believe that the way to go about it is to make it not seem like the lesser of all evils.

I went to school in a suburban/rural community out side of a upper/mid sized urban area. We were the only high school I knew of at the time that had a nursery in school (I have since heard of one more, but only one). The mothers each had to take a 'study hall' period to work the nursery, which provided the staffing, and they were supervised by an instructor. Was this ideal, probably no, but the graduation rate among our mothers was close to 90 something percent (within a few percentage points of the general population). In the meantime, mothers in the larger, urban school system were taken out of the mainstream school and placed in 'special' schools for teen mothers. These schools were not, at the time, voluntary (though I think they may be now), the mother had to go even if she intended to give the baby up for adoption, did not offer advance placement classes (even if the mother had been taken them previously) and the father of the child was not required to attend (therefore did not have their educational path interrupted). The graduation rate for their mothers dropped to close to 70%.

Several years ago, there was a case in the news of an attempt to expel a young woman from the National Honor Society because of her pregnancy. I will be honest here and tell you I cannot find the link, and I don't remember the specifics or the outcomes, but suffice to say, even if she won out, she still had to be brought up in front of everyone one she ever knew and forced to defend herself.

Until we take the shame and the stigma away from an unexpected pregnancy, abo.rtion is going to continue to look like a good alternative.

At any rate, that is probably enough ranting for now, and probably quite enough to set people completely off my blog.

Why I decided to do this...

Well my poor husband probably regrets introducing me to blogs. (Not that I'm not a geek in my own right, but I'm much more of a book geek than an internet geek.) That being said he sent me a link to an old post of Monkey Girl's and I was hooked.

Now I've decided to have a blog of my own, mostly because I have opinions that differ from the ones I'm reading on the blogs now, not that I expect much of anyone to read them.