Nursing, the great underappreciated profession, the unseen gears upon whose grinding the whole of the seemingly sheen healthcare industry propagates itself. Why, they all ask, would anyone subject herself to the blood scrubbing, the kid pricking, the death watching, and the silent smiling amidst the great glory hoggers, the revered MDs in their sleek coats and sleeker cars? Divine calling, perhaps? Good, old fashion, clockwork deterministic fuckery; the heart wants what it wants, etc. and etc., the pedophiles defense? But I always knew that all bodies, all flesh, are equally deserving of the anima's retention. Perhaps it was always just the desire to save.
I tried once for the far-off degree. This was the fall of '99, and amidst the Y2K hysteria everything seemed hopeless. Might as well let our leg's spread and keep our cunts loose, we thought. But nothing actually happened 'cept me getting knocked up.
After careful council with my husband it was determined something had to be done; the situation had changed. I had something growing within me, and it wasn't another idea for a single woman production of Troilus and Cressida (it was misguided, I shouldn't have tried it). We talked.
"Abort it," he said.
"What the fuck? I'm asking if I should stay in school. Abort it? What are you talking about?"
"Oh shit, we're on different pages."
After a little lover's spat regarding the fundamental definition of life and a societally appropriate moral construction surrounding said definition, we decided that I would leave school to raise our kid, become a Nursing School Dropout. But there was no Frankie Avalon song for me, all I got was the suffocatingly stereotypical middle-class cutout experience, the standard 7.5 pounder. Yay.
My advisor told me I could come back to school whenever I was ready, though, faced with a child and eighteen brutal years of parental panic stretching before me, I thought it unlikely that I ever would.
Now, I haven't made a ton of great decisions. Cancun '89 was a particularly bad one. Bar-rat Bradley was another bad one. What's green and eats nuts? Bar-rat Bradley's syphilis. My worst decision was selling my Bitcoin like, two months before it exploded. But raising my daughter? 👌💯
My marriage ended in 2006. My daughter's father and I left on speaking (yelling) terms. That bastard swindled his way into joint custody, leaving me with more time and no ideas on how to spend it. I hadn't worked for eight years, excepting the elementary school volunfeelgoodism, the cookie baking, craft directing, and field trip kid herding I did out of sheer boredom more than any devotion to Rome's crumbling so-called edumacational system. My nursing license had expired years before; I hadn't any ideas. But leave it to my family and friends, their years of good-natured jabs, their jolly joshing, their funny names for me, "freeloader," "Stepford wife," and "dependapotamus," to really kick me into gear. And so like McArthur I returned triumphant -this simile feels off- to complete the BSN Nursing program at GMU University. How fortunate I was to have my husband's generous alimony payments to support my daughter's daycare, see me through school, and buy that new Marc Jacobs bag.
My pre-child career repertoire included a successful stint as a Baskin-Robbins sign spinner, a radio-calisthenics instructor, and a gig at Pacifica Hospital. I worked in a Neurological unit, the 'Fruits gone Vegetable' ward, a long term option for gay men gone comatose as the result of violent conversion therapy. I struggled there. It was always eerie walking into a room and seeing all those fags undone; I had not thought Pence had undone so many. Most of the patients rolled there were likely to die there. I gained some valuable experience. I got to work with ventilators, intravenous therapy, gastrointestinal feedings, those little hairbands Japanese boys wear when they study, but I also got to see the patients' family members' side of the story. Some of them came every day to see their too-shocked sons. Seeing that level of dedication -my ex-husband couldn't even bother picking up our daughter from soccer practice-, and seeing the care and compassion exhibited by my fellow nurses every day, made working that job easier; not easy, but easier.
Unfortunately, I was eventually let go for a "Weekend at Bernie's-esque incident" in which I dressed up one of the patients and took him as my date to my sister's wedding. It would have worked, but I dressed him a little too well and somebody caught on that he was gay and my cover was blown.
Luckily for me, people get hurt at such an alarming rate that the hospital had to rehire me to work in their newly-opened Pediatric Neurological unit. This job, like all others, had its pros and cons. Pro: most of the children "woke up" from their comatose states. Con: some of them had been self-aware while comatose, and snitched about me practicing makeup on them.
Eventually, I moved to another hospital located in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of LA. The patients here were often teenage gang members, specks amidst the great forgotten throngs, the boys born and tossed post-womb without a care, thrown into the world, into the ghetto, onto the Sun soaked streets, into the crack and oxy and a whole lot of whatever else got them high, whatever else they could get to survive. These poor lads, doomed from day one, doomed like all the rest of our fallen race, doomed, perhaps, particularly; these black boys for whom only so little needs to be done, these black boys for whom nothing ever is, born to die, ground down by the great gears of a vast construction naught but the most maniacal among us can hope to understand. How many undone! I hadn't thought…for how could I? Doom stalks the land…
Some of the boys had been shot, some had been stabbed, all had been had. Some had been "jumped," beaten, busted. Many needed wheelchairs to move, others needed rehabilitation therapy to function. Being a pediatric facility, only certain, recognized individuals -family and friends and etc.- were allowed inside. Our security guy, Juan Manuel, was ready to bust any fool's head who even tried a' enter our place, dig? Had Juan Manuel faltered, rival gang members would have staged attacks on our unprotected patients, tried to "finish them off," tried to "pop 'em and stop 'em," tried to "end their corporeal existence for the petty purposes of perceived gang honor/faulty ideas of proper masculine procedure."
Often the boys' mothers would come to visit. How tragic it was to see these poor parents looking so pitifully at their children, thinking the fault their own, thinking their divine destiny having deviated from raising respectable lads to raising another nameless hoodlum, a gun death statistic whose existence causes in Americans everywhere some vague annoyance. How could this supposedly great nation, the whole American project, be failing so? Has the exceptionalism cracked and the truth spilled out?
I also got to work with babies. Most of these small things were druggies from birth, hooked in the womb by mothers tired of life.
"They should have been aborted," my husband always said. "Those poor babies are fucked."
Perhaps. It is true, those babies will never function properly. Most had tracheostomies and got wheeled about in strollers that carried them and their oxygen. Some of them survived long enough to get upgraded to wheelchairs.
"What are those women doing?" my husband would say.
"What they want," I always responded.
He grumbled, unhappy with the answer. And I suppose therein lies the debate.
In 1997 my husband's father (a New Yorker) went and got himself an immune deficiency disorder. He needed outpatient treatment thrice a week and my husband's mother, unable to cope, signaled SOS. My husband and I came Carpathia style, too little too late. While we did what we could to prolong the inevitable, I worked part time at Stony Brook Hospital and attended classes at Stony Brook U (go spongefish!). This, like everything in that Godless hellhole, that hollowed out apple, that great beacon of the west flickering musky, yellow light, was loud, tiring, and stupid. How I longed even for laid back LA. This was the state I was in, I wanted to move back to California.
I worked in the cardiac unit alongside, ironically, heartless automatons, a mass of screaming city-slickers. I felt, to borrow a Wellingtonism, like a wet hen. This place was run like an American war effort -and it had similar effects on the targeted persons as Rome's latest Germanic jaunt-. Misplaced charts, baggy eyed interns, and normal New York incivility left me exhausted and angry. Did I grow as a nurse? I don't know, did electroshock help Hemingway?
After I graduate GMU University, I plan to enter obstetrics. While pregnant with my daughter I had a darling delivery nurse. Hoo-ha based human ejection ain't no easy thang, but she made the process tolerable in a way only a modern day midwife can do. Now, being a nurse, I can do anything in the field, but assisting women during their trying time calls to me.
Having worked with crack stuffed children, I've become very conscious of pregnant women's health. Quick tip: if you don't want your child to grow up retarded, don't snort lines while pregnant. Bonus quick tip: if you still think snorting lines while pregnant is a good idea, go ahead and scrap the fucker, 'cause he/she gonna grow up retarded regardless.
I consider it very fortunate that I'm able to go back to school and be a part of a profession I can be proud of. I wish I hadn't gotten out of the Bitcoin game, but whatever. And, as an added benefit, I don't have to wait until Halloween to be a sexy nurse. I get to be a sexy nurse every day!