lien’s life as it is

tongue in cheek explaination of the medical profession hierachy(click!)

i don’t know if i’ve ever written in depth about how life is like as a student nurse. hmm. haha. but i must say that your sense of humour does get more and more warped as time goes by.

mindsets evolve. you’re no longer squeamish at the sight of blood or corpses. bandaging a leg/arm stump is nothing. you can even do it with your eyes closed.

the smell of human waste doesn’t affect you anymore. chances are, if you are on some form of public transport and there’s someone with incontinence of either kind, you’d be able to sniff it out in no time. but never fear. the art of breathing thru your mouth has become 2nd nature.

you used to think that nobody except yourself or your spouse should see you in the buff(conservative asian values and all). but now you have to look at people in the buff. whether either party likes it or not. you can even tell your friends casually that you’ve looked at parts of people that other ‘pros’ see often. more often, on a bad day.
doctors used to be your hero as a child. they could do anything, you thought.

unfortunately they are now the source of almost all your troubles.

and since you are a puny student,

chaperoning male doctors when examining a female patient + sending patient for MRI + getting stuff from utility room that they ‘forgot’ + stopping blood flow at the weirdest places + helping to restrain mentally unsound patients = normal stuff to you.

hesitate and risk a loudmouth complaint to your tutor : “Your student, I merely asked him/her to help me and i was greeted with the sight of him/her rolling her eyes! Please take your student in hand!”

patients’ relatives seem to think you are The Real Thing , a.k.a A Real Nurse. when they can’t find The Real Thing(sometimes will be in tea room snoozing or gossiping @ nurses station or getting yelled at by Sister), they find you. and proceed to ask you tons of questions you don’t get. in more ways than one.

your friends think patients call you missy. and call you missy as well. thankfully only the really old patients call you missy. the rest just choose to shout “NURSE AH”, because as i said, they really are under the illusion that you are The Real Thing.

nurses, both staff and enrolled, can be either your friend or foe. some choose to think you are complete imbeciles, they themselves forgetting they had just graduated barely 5 years back(some of them). if anything goes wrong, they arrow you. if everything goes smoothly, they tell whoever listens that “i told student to do it one”. some are nice, they teach you stuff patiently. unfortunately they number as much as the fingers on your right hand, as opposed to The Other Side, who number twice as much.

The sisters are an enigma. they seem to be busy busy busy. admin stuff, that’s what they do. and also overseeing nurses. stay out of her way if one of the staff should mess up real bad. Sister on Warpath is a scary thing. even hapless housemen would agree.

your fellow student nurses are your only source of comfort. (except when they fancy themslves to be The Real Thing). they biatch with you constantly, cover up for you when you commit minor mistakes(major ones…who’s a perfect saint these days eh?) and agree fervently when you commiserate about an unjust talking-to you received earlier in the day.

you think life really can get you down sometimes.

but when a patient smiles at you and tells you with absolute honesty that he/she thinks you’d be a good nurse when you graduate, you know life is pretty sweet after all