How the hell do they do it?

Once in a great while I like to pull myself away from the humor, wisdom, and pathos that is my own little blog, and check out what else is out there in BlogLand.

Generally I come scurrying back here in fear, as what’s out there can be truly frightening in so many ways. Hello, punctuation and grammar? America is looking for you!

But sometimes I, like any mere mortal, get sucked into a different world, and then find myself in an endless loop of blogs within that genre. Like now. Where I’m fascinated by nursing blogs. Especially the ones that have entertaining or poignant or scary stories about their patients. And some are mind-boggling…..but not in a good way.

And here, dear fifteens of readers, is where these nurses and I part ways. Because if I had patients in my ER who:

1) Came in faking pain so they could get narcotics, and do this every few days;

2) Come in for the sniffles or a paper cut and demand to be seen right away;

3) Call me all sorts of nasty things and demand lunch, coffee, water for their 16 ho-bag friends; or

4) Come in with the same problems every week, because they refuse to take care of themselves in even the most basic of ways…..

……I wouldn’t be able to treat them. My head would explode. You wanna call me a honky bitch and demand narcotics for your made-up pain? Uh, right. You get nothing, and you’ll sit there for 10 hours getting nothing. Apparently, the ER is Command Central for every POS scumbag dreg of society, who thinks nothing of using said ER as a waystation for anything and everything. Hey, I need my drug fix! Why don’t I go to the hospital and take precious time and resources away from the few people who actually need them?

So that’s the cynical and bitchy side of me.

Then there’s the logical side. And here I part ways as well.

Because if I had a 94-year-old demented, incontinent, brain-damaged husk of a person who will never have any kind of life that’s not hooked up to ventilators, and who will never regain consciousness, much less sit up in bed asking for a Coke, so to speak – and yet the family wants all measures taken to keep this husk of a person alive……well, I couldn’t do that either. God’s will? Right. According to God, that person would have been dead a long time ago, and it’s only man’s machines that are keeping them alive. Doing chest compressions and all these other heroic measures just because the family doesn’t have the guts to do the right thing? Nope. Again, the head-exploding thing.

This is why I think nurses are so kick-ass, for being able to do what they do. And not because it must be pretty damn hard to deal with death and dying and shattered lives on a regular basis, like every day, but because of all the other stuff. The insanity of it all. The illogic. The rage I’d feel in having to try and help people who are basically a blot on society. Yeah, no, not gonna happen. I’d be Nurse Ratched. On steroids.

And if I for whatever reason ever wind up drooling and stupid in a hospital bed, unable to read or write (2 key things in my book), for god’s sake, someone pull the damn plug already. Even if you have to “accidentally” kick it out of its socket and distract doctors by doing some enfeebled magic tricks that are awesome in their badness. Please, just do what needs to be done. Thank you.

And all you nurses out there? Yeah, you guys rock. Big time. Thanks for dealing with all this shit so the rest of us don’t have to. I am in awe.