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 
Also, i went for ros’s bday bbq and i did lots of the bbq with jasmine! should have brought my n95 mask but den again lets spare the residents from getting freaked out by that mask.
discrimination
Thursday, November 23rd, 2006[be warned : lilien warns you gravely this is a long and perhaps incoherent post. lilien is not from JC therefore she cannot write GP standard essays. lilien advises you to read only if you are suffering from boredomitis. lilien is also talking in third-party speak because she has been influenced by the characters Izzie and Alex from Grey's Anatomy. ]
i just saw an ex-classmate’s photo on somerandomwebsite and i started laughing like crazy. i tried closing my eyes, breathing in and out(relaxation techniques lah!) but the moment i opened my eyes and saw the same picture again, i knew i tak boleh tahan so i closed the browser tab and went somewhere else.
what is it about a person that makes him/her attractive/appealing? do you focus more on the physical or the spiritual/mental aspect? as humans, i daresay most(if not all) of us focus greatly on the physical until time spent with the person reveals more which may or may not force us to look into the spiritual/mental aspects.
let me tell you the real reason why i laughed at said ex-classmate’s photo.
firstly, according to worldly standards, she/he wouldn’t be considered attractive at all. thankfully(or not) for him/her, she/he actually finds him/herself pretty darned good looking. but i’m not one to totally judge everyone by their physical attractiveness(it would be shallow of me to do so lor, considering the fact that i’m not exactly Miss Universe myself). the main reason why i never found her/him appealing in any way was because he/she was a terrible gossip, majoring in malicious unfounded rumours about a classmate , minoring in exaggerating stories about another innocent classmate. even within her/his own group of friends, he/she managed to come up with snarky nicknames for each and everyone of them. with that, i found it extremely difficult to see any good in him/her.
i admit i was no saint, i made several lame jokes at his/her expense to express my contempt for her/his inept remarks. i even drew a crude chinese cartoon(i command you to stop laughing! lol.) that depicted him/her getting rammed down by a bus/train(at that time there were quite a number of MRT suicides). its kinda bittersweet to remember these kinda things cos they WERE funny if they weren’t actually about a real person per se.
last i heard, he/she was still the same, hadn’t changed a bit.
ooh. discrimination discrimination discrimination.
what right do we have to discriminate against others when we too are flawed, albeit in different forms?
let’s reflect a bit. i’ll give you an example.
Izzie’s most annoying personality trait is shooting off her mouth extremely loudly all at the wrong times. however, she doesn’t realise it because nobody really listens to themselves talking, don’t they(unless they’re radio deejays). however when she meets Alex who exhibits the exact same trait, she gets driven crazy because she is extremely annoyed by that trait. her friends Meredith and George don’t seem to be affected at all. a few weeks later Izzie watches a candid video clip of herself taken by Cristina and realises to her dismay that the very trait she disliked in Alex was in her as well.
interesting, isn’t it. everyone of us has a little of Izzie inside us and probably also have a Alex in our lives as well.
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writing this piece was part of some reflecting i was doing earlier. although i know that being human, i won’t exactly fully stop this nasty trait, i will consciously make an effort to stop.
will you do that too?
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