Yes, I am a nurse but please don’t mistake me for a doctor. With all due respect, I really don’t want to look at that thing growing on your head, and I don’t know why you’ve had a nagging cough for 3 weeks, and please, put your list of medications back in your wallet. Thanks.
I love what I do. It’s a beautiful, fulfilling, challenging and respectable profession that always comes with the classic question… ‘can you take a look at this?’
I strongly believe that all nurses are hard wired with the most bizarre sense of humour know to man. While most people, normal people, lay in bed at night, scrolling through their Facebook news feed or catching up on current events, you can find us captivated by Dr. Pimple Popper. It’s like a mandatory requirement for entering the nursing field, that you must love sebaceous cysts.
I’m going to talk to all of the husbands’ and wives of nurses right now. Have you literally given up hope that we will EVER be home when we say we will? Have you just given up on the “where are you” text? Well, I’m here to tell you where we are. We’re in report. Report is very important. It’s how we communicate about our patients’ but it’s also where we talk, catch up, debrief, complain about doctors, laugh, cry and laugh until we cry. It’s a lot like running into an old friend at the mall, every single day at shift change. And let’s be honest, the longer report takes… the better the chance that I get a night off from the bedtime routine 😉
And how about all those treats? Now we may not get the perks like some; there are no company vehicles, credit cards or Christmas bonuses. But we do get baking, lots of it. Families often feel inclined to thank us through baked goods. And at Christmas time, it’s not unusual to see stacks of chocolates in the break room. With all this food at our finger tips, it’s been know to sit, uncovered, for days and days. Most of us will walk by it and think about tossing it, but no one ever does. It sits until someone, usually on a night shift, gives in to all inhibitions around 0300 and reaches for that dried out, lonely old Tim-Bit, because… well, you wouldn’t want it to go to waste.
I feel like my next point is a lot like fight club, you know, “the first rule of fight club is: you do not talk about fight club”?! Well, as a nurse-mom I feel like I’m talking about fight club when I divulge the awesomeness of a night shift. Now don’t get me wrong, night shifts can get pretty hairy, but hear me out. Night shifts are my “Me” time. I stay up all night eating junk then I come home to an empty house with no kids. I take off my bra and sprawl out in my king sized bed for the best nap of my life. What could be better than that? I feel like I’m making a lot of non-nurse moms very jealous right now.
One time, I made the mistake of working a night shift and not having my kids spend the day with their grandparents’. I mean, how bad could it be?
What happened next will be forever etched in my mind.
I got home from work just as my hubby was leaving and the kids were waking up. I told the boys that we were going to have a “movie morning”. I made popcorn, dimmed the lights, put on The Lion King and lasted through the credits before I slipped into a coma. When I came to, I had what seemed like every toy they owned on top of me. The movie was over and my house looked like a war zone. They had flipped over a portion of the sectional and Cruz was perched on top of it like an Eagle perched on a cliff. I don’t think any of their popcorn was eaten because it scattered everywhere, like EVERYWHERE. I walked into the kitchen to discover that they had decided to make sandwiches, great. Every cupboard was open and there was peanut butter and jelly smeared from one end of my kitchen to the other. The final straw was when Benz proudly boasted that he had pooped on the toilet like a big boy… I walk into the bathroom to survey the damage and, well, ever heard of the phrase “sh*t storm”? Well, it looked like one of those had passed through my bathroom. Haha, God love him for trying!
So needless to say, I will NEVER do that again. Lesson learned.
It really would’t be a blog post about nurses if I didn’t mention the attire. So often people will make comments like, “I wish I could wear a uniform everyday, it would be like wearing pyjamas to work”. Yes, the uniforms are great and comfort is a must. With that being said, the only way optimal comfort can be achieved is if one wears the proper undergarments. Now we’ve all done it, we’ve tried to wear ‘cute’ panties to work and the first hour in, you find yourself slipping into vacant rooms trying to pull said panties from your hungry bum. It just doesn’t work. What does work though, the $12.97 Hanes Her Way package of 5 from Walmart. Husbands hate them but boy do we love them!
So here’s to all the hard working, awesome nurses who can laugh at themselves (until they pee a little).
Bio:
My name is Jamie, I am a small town Canadian girl, raising tow boys right in the heart of ranching country.. and I’m NOT a rancher! I am nurse but trade but weirdo by.. always. I shop online way too much. I love watching Dr. Pimple Popper late at night, I am a self taught accordion player currently working on mastering Despacito. I am a avid thrift store shopper and collector of aprons. https://adventuresofaboymomblog.wordpress.com
This post was originally published on adventures of a boy mom.
