Things You’ll Only Hear out of a Nurse’s Mouth
Apr 7, 2015 | 9:00 am
The World is One Big Hospital
Nobody really wants to bring their work home with them, and nurses really aren’t any different. At the end of the day, all they really crave is a long, relaxing soak in a hot tub, a readymade dinner by an obliging chef, and a foot rub. Give them the remote control and they’ll watch anything on television except a show featuring nurses. It doesn’t matter how popular the show is or how long it’s been on the air, there is absolutely no enjoying a medical show with a nurse because every five minutes you’ll hear, “that’s not realistic!”
Nurse sayings don’t stop at doctor-nurse, nurse-patient relationships, who push around the hospital equipment and muttering about the petite nurse on the show being a “band-aid bunny.” Nurses begin identifying everything with hospital settings as soon as they walk out the door of the facility. Their sense of smell associates rotting garbage with “mucomyst.” A cat’s litter box smells like keflex, skunks smell like cydosporine, and rhubarb smells like dopamine.
It’s not just the sense of smell that changes a nurse’s perceptions of the outside world, but the sense of sight. A typical nurse saying when meeting people who are taking particular poor care of their health, such as drug abuse, alcoholism or extreme obesity is, “I’ll see you soon.” The nurse may sound perfectly polite and even cheerful, but the real message is, “you’re about to become my patient.” A nurse examining a two carats diamond ring on a prominently veined hand, or checking out the bulging muscles on an athlete isn’t really thinking about the diamond or the muscles, but “wow! I could totally hit that” – with a needle.
Is Your Sense of Humor Warped Yet?
If you’re trying to find a scary movie for a nurse or digging around for your grossest joke, chances are you’ll fail to leave an impression. Nurses tend to become a bit cynical over time, and nurse sayings reflect their constant exposure to the harder knocks in life. You’re bleeding? The first thing the nurse will ask is, “did you lose any body parts? Are they all in good working order? No? You’ll be alright.” A nurse will explain that the pain will go away when it stops hurting, and that, if you’re able to say, “I can’t breathe,” you’re still breathing.
Nurses refer to motorcyclists as organ donors, and pray that the vehicle that just burst into an eighty-mile an hour spurt in front of them doesn’t wreck because they don’t want to be the ones who stop to help pick up the pieces. They believe that “too stupid to live” should be a diagnosis, and that every patient needs a little THC: Thorazine, Lorazapam and Compazine. Nurse humor includes stating that not all patients are annoying; some of them are dead. Another nurse saying is that “the problem with the gene pool is, it has no life guard”.
Stress is a Normal Part of Life
A nurse’s life is so stressful that a popular nurse saying is that they woke up from a nightmare screaming, only to realize they hadn’t yet fallen asleep. Going to sleep isn’t really that difficult if you’re a nurse. Nurses state they can drink an entire pot of coffee before bedtime and still put in six hours of rest without even rolling over. They’ll only look at you in amazement if you groan about having to work on Sundays as they’ve long ago forgotten that most people separate their time off with a weekend break.
The motto of a nurse is that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and if it hasn’t gone wrong, you don’t understand the situation.” Nurses might blithely inform you that “everybody gets treated the same, until they piss off the nurse,” and that they never hit doctors or patients unless they deserve it.
While nurse sayings might sound peculiar and counter-productive to a profession that is supposed to be caring and sensitive to the needs of others, it’s humor that puts life in perspective humor that relieves the dark moments of a crisis. You won’t be able to gross a nurse out. The stories of their day at work are enough to make listeners at the next table in a restaurant vomit, nor will your “potty mouth” shock them. “Vagina” and “penis” are a casual part of their every day vocabulary. But, you will be able to get a nurse to appreciate you if you don’t ask them to look at the body rash on your upper thigh, or if your next evening out is to a massage parlor instead of the latest premier showing of doctors and nurses. Nurses are caring. They work hard and handle some of the most stress-filled situations imaginable, so the best you can do is take their humor with a grain of salt and find something to do that can make your significant other forget for awhile that he or she has chosen a life of nursing.