Silly shows: A Nursing Rant

Disclaimer: Even though I base my stories on my experiences as a nurse, any resemblance of my nursing stories to real individuals is purely coincidental.

Well, Agatestone asked me (probably with good reason), what my fascination with The A-Team was. So I decided that it was about time to write more extensively about my profession. No, I'm not a soldier of fortune. Nor am I a fugitive (I haven't done anything to raise the government's ire...lately. Heh). Anyway, I am (as some of you reading this already know), a registered nurse. What people may not know about me is that about 100 years ago, I was a film student. I think I saw just about every art film, and "great" film, that there was to be seen during that time. I saw "Citizen Kane" so many times for different classes that the mere mention of it usually has me running from the room. I won't take you down the long and arduous path that led me to nursing school, that is irrelevant to this post.

Anyway, for awhile, I was quite a bit of a film snob: I usually refused to see any film that wasn't supposed to be "great" in some way. I can't say much about televsion back in those days, I didn't have one until about my last year in school. I still remember the time when my housemates and I pooled our scarce funds to get cable and we all watched "MTV" for the first time. For the most part, we found the commercials to be more fascinating than the videos. But I digress...

I noticed, around my third year of nursing school, that I spent what little spare time I had watching silly television shows, and if a film was nominated for an Academy Award, I generally wanted to skip it. Last weekend, my reason for this switch in my taste really came home to me.

I had a new patient who had been transferred to the ICU from another floor. I had maybe one blissful hour that day in which I could do my normal nursing stuff like assessments and medication administration, and then this transferred patient "crashed:" became extremely unstable medically. I spent most of the rest of my shift in that one patient's room with a team of doctors, trying to keep the patient alive (we succeeded, by the way).

On top of the efforts spent keeping this patient alive, I was continually frustrated by the fact that there were things that we needed such as "stat" medications and crucial equipment that were missing from our unit. Sometimes I felt like I was taking care of the patient; at other times, I felt like I was on a surreal scavenger hunt. I ended up working overtime that day, and I had basically worked for 14 hours with no food, and not even time to get a drink of water. But the nurse who had the patient after I did made sure she spent time pointing out everything that I had done wrong that day (none of which were life-threatening or crucial for the patient at the time).

So this is probably a good time to introduce anyone who is still reading this to a not-very-well-kept secret in nursing: Nurses eat their young. It's such a widespread phenomenon that it's basically a cliche in the business. I am obviously not a new nurse, but I am new to the specialty of ICU nursing, so I am, unfortunately, subjected to this sort of "hazing" process.

There have been other times in my career that other nurses have intentionally tried to get me into trouble, and assorted other nastiness, and sometimes I have faced basic open hostility from other nurses. It never fails to amaze me how we can be in a healing profession, and treat each other so horribly. Of course, not all nurses are like this. I have many colleagues who are more than willing to help out and work as a team. But the number of times I have spent dealing with the kind of behavior that I have described above makes me feel like sometimes I can't trust anyone that I am working with. And that is sad, because every one of us in the profession face the sort of life-and-death situations that I have been talking about, and every one of us has been new, either in nursing, or in a certain specialty.

So if you have managed to hang in with me here this far, you will probably already have guessed why I like to watch shows like The A-Team: they have nothing to do with the reality of nursing, dying patients, nasty co-workers, etc. Although I do enjoy good films and television shows, I have sort of a collection of "therapy" films and shows that take me as far from the world of my profession as possible. Other favorites are "Night Court" and "MacGuyver" reruns when I can find them, "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns," "Twister," "Leaving Normal," and "Men in Black." It's great to sit down and either laugh my butt off or be transported to a place that has absolutely nothing to do with reality, and doesn't require more decision-making power from me than which button to push on the remote.

So what did I do after that terribly long day with the unstable patient? I watched "Overboard" with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell for about the millionth time. Laughed my butt off, too.