Sorry Nurses…
So there have been alot of things to get used to working at my new job. Just about everyone goes on vacation between the 4th of July and Labor Day. Just about everyone works between 8 and 6. Many people are content with their current jobs and plan to work there until they retire. They see their children and significant others. If you refer to someone as the “nice” guy that’s usually not enough to identify them. If you refer to someone as an “asshole” usually that is enough to identify them. But there was always something more…and unfortunately for nurses that “something more” was the fact that my new profession wasn’t subservient to another.
I know being a paralegal and a nurse have many differences, but at the end of the day they are subservients to lawyers and doctors respectively, and it doesn’t matter if the former has been on the job 40 years and the latter is on their first day…JD equals “Just Do what I say” and MD equals ”My Decision.”
So what do we do? We live with it. Paralegals because we need a check. Nurses because they do a valuable service and help people. That is the first major thing that separates a nurse from a paralegal. Their job has meaning. Yay! Plus for nurses…except that doctors know this and they abuse nurses even more because of it. The second and last major thing that separates nurses from paralegals is that it’s relatively easy to go from being a paralegal to lawyer, relatively difficult to go from nurse to doctor.
I am not all that familiar with the nurse/medical school curriculums. I would think as a matter of common sense that the bodies of knowledge overlap. Therefore, if medicine was not a profession, and medicine was not a business, and we as a society simply wanted to provide the best healthcare to as many people as possible it would SEEM that nurses should have expediated ways of getting their M.D. If doctors looked at nurses like people who were simply taking the long way around to their eventual destination they would treat them with a little more respect.
But let’s be real. That’s never, ever going to happen. If you’re in nursing school and you’re already bitching about how med students/doctors say that you should breeze right through your curriculum then this really isn’t the job for you. Nursing curriculums are getting harder, longer and more expensive and nurse salaries and prestige are not rising accordingly. If you already have significant deposits in the resentment bank and you’re several years away from day one get out now. Not for yourself but for your future patients.
I know this one nurse in her fifties who after thirty years of getting passed by doctors in the parking lot in beemers she decided to mortgage everything she had and get one for herself. Naturally she couldn’t afford it so she “traded down” to a lexus after transferring the lease to her debt-ridden idiot son fresh out of lawschool. Then she got laid off and now works as a low-level pencil pusher in some insurance company. Her son and husband lost their jobs in the same period of time…so her son “traded down” to a brand new Mustang ala Mike Triforce. Like mother like son. At least he’s not dating a diseased bar skank (love you princess!) The point is don’t be this woman. The question is…how?
The key is to define yourself as something that’s not your job. That’s one reason why the best nurses are mothers…though not the one above. Maybe you play/coach a sport. Maybe you love dancing, or traveling. Maybe you love write or garden. If you’re a nurse you care about people. There is SO MUCH more you can do to help people (particularly kids)…but don’t do it for people. If you’re a good nurse you’ve done more than your fair share. This you need to do for yourself because it will help you on the job and give you something that a doctor can’t belittle.
Oh, and before the doctors start commenting…this was written with the blessing of Simon’s Girlfriend
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! That will be the day. Nurses becoming doctors…yeah like the guy who flipped burgers at McDonalds for ten years and decided to go to the Cordon Bleu. They even gave him an expedited path through the curriculum because afer all he’d had a decade’s worth of experience in the field.
EPIC EPIC fail. Plus, I am not going to blow myself in the resident’s lounge.
I’ve been a nurse in three countries now. I’ve never felt dissed by doctors (except for one plastic surgeon in Florida who was a notorious asshole, and I got even with him by being passive-aggressive, work-exactly-to-rule, frustrating his jerkwad self by doing EXACTLY what he said, and not one motion more. Drove him so crazy when he’d change dressings on his patients on my ward that he didn’t crack any more shit with me.)
Anyway, perhaps it’s because I’m a male nurse, am knowledgeable and self-confident that they don’t give me crap. But also with skillful female nurses, we’re treated more as members of the medical team than servile lackeys. I don’t know where your perception of the doctor-nurse zeitgeist comes from. I worked in a lot of facilities in Florida, and a large teaching hospital in San Francisco. Part of what we nurses did, overtly, is mould doctors’ behaviour. When they acted unprofessionally toward us or the patients, there were lots of ways we could make the consequences of their actions negative. Most got the message.
That said, I respect physicians’ greater depth of knowledge. They have the brains, but we nurses have the eyes and ears of where the rubber meets the road, or where “the butt meets the bedsheet” in terms of how the patients are doing. I’v found that doctors appreciate what we know, and are willing to take guidance based on our assessment.
I will say that American doctors tend to be snottier than MDs in Australia and Canada. Not all of ‘em are bad in the U.S., although the younger ones tend to be more jerky. I think the hyper-competitiveness to get into med school, and the greed of “I will get into a specialty that makes me a millionaire” draws more megalomaniacs. Aussie and Canuck doctors come from cultures that value egalitarianism and civility more than America, and that’s reflected in their physicians.
One last thing — in Australia, it’s not uncommon for nurses to become doctors. One of my mates from Melbourne, a blokey bloke of a male nurse, was accepted to med school and was almost finished before I immigrated to Canada. The ability to have upward mobility stems from Oz’s “we’re all equal, mates!” ethos. It also helps that higher education is not so bloody expensive there, and overnment loan repayment programs are not as onerous as in the U.S.
Too bad America is so fcuked. But that’s part of the many reasons my wife and I fled the country. Good luck. You’re gonna need it.
First let me begin by saying USA! USA!USA!
Next, the only reason for a male nurse is that some AMERICAN doctors are so tired of strange pussy getting thrown at them that they actually become bicurious. I haven’t learned a nurse’s name in ten years and I damn sure don’t plan to start learning them now.
Let me tell YOU a story. My father runs a private hospital, has for over 30 years. Politics dictated that he attend the funeral for one of the older nurses because the hospital got some negative press for refusing to treat her. I remember my father looking at her, laid out in her casket, in a peculiar fashion. When I asked about he said 1) this was his first occasion to see a nurse from his hospital out of uniform 2) this was the first time he saw a nurse he could no longer intimidate and 3) he said that he just hated to see a nurse lying down.
BOOM!!! BOOM!!! BOOM!!!