trade secrets

One of my friends from My First Staff Nurse Job and I have a common goal: to get the hell out of bedside nursing.

Well, she's out of bedside nursing, and I'm still stuck here, albeit by choice, and not-so-much-choice, i.e. massive student loan debt.

It's not that I hate my job, it's just that I'd like the idea that I don't have to be beholden to the same career for years and years and years. I'd eventually like to do something else, perhaps something more morally sound and aesthetically pleasing, like shovel chicken shit, or hunt and club baby seals to death (which is coincidentally quite a bit like acute care nursing, so maybe I need to think of better examples).

So I e-mailed her in one of my now-random moments of semi-lucidness and said, "Hey! We should start up an internet dating service for nurses!"

Okay, it's probably already been done, but the reason why I mentioned it at all is because the job is pretty socially isolating. Most people don't talk about other people's bowel movements or vomit and eat their dinner at the same time. Nor do they stop eating dinner, go and clean up someone else's bowel movement or vomit, wash their hands, and go back to eating their dinner like they didn't just see and handle the digested products of someone else's dinner.

When you try to explain to non-nurses how this feat is possible, they look at you as if you've just plopped a dead baby seal on the dining room table and invited them to dig in, mate.

But other nurses get it.

This New Crackpot Idea comes from a list of get-rich-slowly schemes such as our Bladder Scanner Emporium Outlet Idea (because it's our theory that the former Soviet Bloc seems to have a monopoly on bladder scanners, which any nurse with her/his salt thinks is just a random number generator, as opposed to an actual usefully accurate and precise tool of measurement).

Meanwhile, I have got to find a way to sleep through the night. Five more weeks of being undead. Five more weeks.

Egh.