ADVENTURES
IN NURSING
MORE FIRST YEAR MEMORIES
Life is funny
sometimes. As I was experiencing ...
struggling through ... tolerating ... dreading ... nursing school, I was sure
that I would never forget one damned thing that happened. Boy, was I wrong. Life gets busy, overwhelming, and your brain
gets so full of stuff that you have to let some things leak out. I guess that’s what has happened here.
Now that I’m ready to commit
my memories to “paper,” my memories have disappeared. I know there were exciting things ...
dreadful things ... annoying things ... maybe even enlightening and joyous
things ... that occurred at least every week, if not every day, but for the
life of me, I seem to be tapped out. Oh,
well, I’ll do the best I can.
The first thing that comes
to my feeble mind is the day I discovered the autopsy book. I found it in our class library during break
time, and was absolutely fascinated by it.
It was about a foot thick, and had these beautiful overlays of the
different body parts and systems during real autopsy procedures.
Yeah, I know it’s weird
but hey, I’m nothing if not weird.
Nursing school will do that to you, too, on the off chance you’re not
weird when you start. Trust me, you will
be by the time you make it through a nursing program. No subject will be sacred. You’ll find yourself discussing the
consistency of your patient’s bowel movements over chips and salsa. You’ll be describing wound drainage over wine
and cheese. If you’re anything like me,
you’ll even chat about the color of tenacious secretions over your eggs and
toast. Lord help you!
But I digress. So, while my classmates spent their break
time studying, or gossiping with each other, or just vegging out for 20
minutes, there I’d be paging through the autopsy book while I sipped my soda
and munched my Fritos. I often wondered
just how cool it would be to actually witness an autopsy. Nowadays, after having read too many Kay
Scarpetta novels, I realize the smell would get to me long before the various
fluids and juices in the human body would.
I recommend you try to
locate a good autopsy picture book, and flip through it for a few minutes. It’s almost as good as the real thing, and
you might just want to find out how strong your stomach really is. It couldn’t hurt!
I had a friend one time that worked at a limousine company. They also had authorization to pick up bodies and bring them to coroner offices or funeral homes. One day, he asked me if I wanted to do a run with him to Pasadena, TX. I said sure. To make a long story short, realizing we had a dead body with us in the back of that van, had me nauseated, I was close to hysteria, and by the time we were at the Louisiana border, I had my head hanging out the window into the wind. My hands were clammy and I was a nut case. SO...just imaging the smell of formaldehyde in an autopsy room, would have me being admitted to a psychiatric ward. I could NOT do dead people!
ReplyDeleteSorry, I had to laugh at this, Dani. I could just picture a fancy-schmancy limo cruising down the freeway with your head hanging out, all green around the gills and such! While I don't much enjoy being around dead bodies, I have learned to tolerate them. It still remains weird to me, though.
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