Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Girls, Girls Girls. Long Legs and Burgundy Lips

I'm posting a couple of pics from my photo taking extravaganza in the Kinnick Stadium area of town where I took pictures of weird stuff. They have nothing to do with this post, I just like them. This one is of a bunch of gray box looking things all standing nicely at attention...

Tonight I'm pilfering from my old blog again. This was from an entry I posted in August of 2006. In it, I wrote about a job that I loved, but couldn't afford to work. I liked doing the patient advocacy, phlebotomy, interpreting for Spanish speaking patients, and mostly all the baby holding I got to do there. Okay, have at it:

I ran into my one of my old nurse managers from the ob/gyn clinic at our neighborhood block party (which isn't really quite my neighborhood, but I still get invited every year anyway) and then today at Coady's cross-country meet, I saw another nurse from the clinic. I realized I hadn't written about it much on here, so I guess I'll just rectify that tonight.

You may not want to work here if you either hate or love babies. If you hate babies you will be forced to deal with them on a daily basis. Many women who come back for their six week post-partum appointment will bring their spawn and someone has to hold them while their mothers are back in the stir-ups again. That somebody would be you.

If you love babies, your heart will break several times during your shift. You will have to treat pregnant women who have already had their last five children taken away from them and they'll claim that this time will be different. You won't believe them. You may also have to draw blood from women who tell you right off the bat that you won't find a usable vein. "Believe me. If there was one I could get to, I would have already found it and used it up." Since these women have very few teeth in their heads, you may make the assumption that what they're slamming in their veins is crank. Then when you are actually lucky enough to find one, your patients will get all excited and pay very careful attention to it's location so they can rush right home and slam some more.

You may not want to work here if you are a heterosexual male or a homosexual female and you want to stay attracted to women. There are many things you will see, hear and most importantly, smell that could dim your sexual interest. Just as, I am sure, there are several other clinics in the hospital that would have a similar effect on heterosexual women and homosexual men.

You may not want to work here if you have problems dealing with difficult people. On Thursdays you will be assigned to work the menopause clinic in the morning and the PMS clinic in the afternoon. If you choose this position, you might want to start cultivating a healthy after-work alcohol drinking regimen on Thursdays as well.

You may not want to work here if you are afraid of old people. You will see all kinds of women in various forms of undress here. There are certain clinics such as the uro-gyn clinic that is mainly populated by women with incontinence issues and most are over forty. For our own amusement, we prefer to think of this as the Ida/Eunice/Madge clinic, as opposed to the colposcopy clinic (dealing with the treatment of abnormal cells on the cervix generally as the result of exposure to HPV) which is mainly attended by women in their early twenties and therefore called the Ashley/Brittany/Nicole clinic.

You may not want to work here if you have a hard time saying no. Many women think that the root of any or all of their problems is harboring a uterus. They will ask you in several different ways if you will please see to it that their uterus is removed. Doctors are reluctant to perform a hysterectomy for no reason, as the surgery could cause scar tissue and sudden menopausal symptoms that may be much worse than the original complaint. Your job will be to tell these women, no - even if they try to trick you by calling their womb a cooter bug, which has happened, let me assure you.

You may not want to work here if you you have a hard time telling people things they don't want to accept. Many times the horrible pain women are feeling and are sure are fibroids, ectopic pregnancies, or endometriosis, is really just gas. You must be delicate in the delivery of this diagnosis as these same women are going to have to go home and tell their husbands that the tumor they were sure was only going to give them six more months to live, can easily be treated with Metamucil.

Oh yeah, the pay sucks, you don't get breaks and rarely will you get the chance to sit down for five minutes to eat your lunch. Now, when can you start?

...And this one is of those same box things close-up and with a girl skating in front of them.

9 comments:

cd said...

see, you say you're ungoogleable but i actually came across your page whilst looking for a picture of abner kravitz (bewitched) - how random is that?!

luckily for me, it was serendipitous because i have massively enjoyed reading your page and looking at your photos. i feel like i just sneaked a look at someone's diary.

i must start blogging again...

:o)

rel said...

Churlita,
I'm afraid of old folks; mainly me.
Oh and I'm also afraid of cooter-bugs.
rel

Mrs. Hairy Woman said...

That is not frightening at all.. so where can I sign up?..lol

NoRegrets said...

whew.
how long did you work there?

laura b. said...

What a great post! It sounds like a job I would enjoy peeking in on for a day...or for the length of that post maybe...but I am not a kind or patient enough person to be useful in that environment.

Churlita said...

Claire,

that ungoogleable thing is because my old blog had my name in the URL and people I didn't want to find my blog could get to it, just by googling my name. I switched blogs and it's not so easy for that to happen. I'm glad you found it and liked it though.

Rel,

You are right to be afraid of cooter bugs and people who use that term.

Mrs,

You'd have to check with your local hospital for nursing assistant jobs.Ha ha.

Nor,

for almost two years. I transferred from there to one of the worst jobs of my life. I got out of that one in about a year and ended up where I am now.

LauraB.,

You have to be good at dealing with crazy, and I've had WAY too much experience dealing with that in my life.

Chance said...

What a terrific post... I love insights into the lows and, uh, other lows of jobs like that.

Churlita said...

Chance,

The scary part is that I tried really hard not to get into the lowest of the lows of that job. You can all thank me for that.

Poptart said...

I never read this post in the old blog, so I'm really glad you reposted it! I never knew much about this job, the one that killed your nursing school dreams, and now it makes more sense...

Wow. What a place.