Chapter 38 Nursing Stories

My girlfriend from college that came out to Bartlesville from back east was a nurse.  The trouble is that she didn't much like it from her experience with clinical in nursing school.  So on arriving in Bartlesville she went back to bar tending which put her through school.

We rented a house on Greystone just east of the Quarters at the top of the hill.  She went to work for Larry Lively and things were pretty hectic what with working for the guy and having to help his girl friend after he beat her up regularly.  But she stuck it out with him.  He stopped on the side of 75 on night coming back from Tulsa and pulled her from their car and beat her with a belt.  On another occasion he nailed her in a closet of their home where she was hiding from him.  Not her physically, just the door.

As the world turns.

Well my girlfriend and wife #1 did take her nursing boards at my urging and landed a job at Jane Phillips.

Now, I want to say here, that she deserved a lot better than she got from me.  She was a wonderful woman, smart, outgoing, headstrong, pretty, a real keeper.  I just met her too soon in my life it seems.

Well she took Jane Phillips by storm. The hospital had such a shortage of registered nurses that if you had a BS-RN you were immediately given a lot of responsibility.  In her case she was made charge nurse of a unit.  After a few weeks of wearing a dress, hat and the proper shoes, she started wearing white pants and tunic and ditched the hat.

The hospital administrators were not keen on that and it escalated to the board and she allied herself with some doctors who agreed with her that her choice of dress did not impact her nursing care if anything it made it better because she was not afraid of giving the staff a moon every time she had to get up on the bed to help roll one of their "large" patients.

She won.  I was proud of her, but would have not expected anything less.

She used to come home from work and regale me with stories.  She did some time in the ER and those storied were the best.

On weekends there was never a shortage of excitement.  The casualties and such poured in from Pawhuska.  Those Osage Indians really knew how to party.  I recall one episode she recounted to me.  Seems late one Saturday evening a middle aged lady came in with a problem.  Seems she had something lodged in her vagina.  As my Future Ex # 1 recounted it, the woman was drunk off her ass, and just kept laughing hysterically.  She laughed the whole time the doctor worked on her.  It appears she had a tampon lodged crossways in her vagina. To make matters worse, it was still in the dispenser tube. It appears that in her inebriated state she had failed to insert it correctly and remove the tube.  She had just shoved it in and forgot to remove the tube.  She then proceeded to engage in sex with several gentlemen and in their zeal they were not about to let something like a tampon get in their way.  So onward and upward they went, figuratively and literally.  They pounded the thing in pretty good and it lodged crossways high up in her vagina.  I guess she thought it was pretty funny since she was still laughing when she left.  I have to say I am very impressed with the rigidity of the tools of the men involved.  I think I would have given up if I had started pounding the end of my pecker into something as unyielding as a cardboard tampon tube.  But hey, maybe the quim of  a heifer cow or ewe feels that way.  You never know, right?

The next funny story was about someone being brought in with a heart attack and the doctors failed to revive him even after prolonged CPR and defilibration.  That was before her shift.  They pulled the screen around his bed and when my Ex came in told her that she had a patient.  She walked over and stepped behind the curtain to see the obviously dead patient.  Good fun, right?   She said he was in pretty poor shape, ribs broken from the CPR and what not. 

 

We were sitting on our front porch of a rental we lived in off Greystone behind the Quarters.  We were both laughing and having a glass of wine when our neighbors drove up and looked pretty devastated.  Being good neighbors we struck up a conversation and asked how their day was going.  "Not too good," they replied.  It seems the wife's father had died that very day from....yeah you guessed it: a fatal heart attack.  My Future Ex #1 just about choked on her wine.  It was pretty funny at the time.

This wasn't so much a funny story but a commentary to the abiding stupidity of man.  The hospital had a Garp ward, named aptly for the book, The World According to Garp.

It was peopled by head trauma injuries brought about by failure to wear motorcycle helmets.  They would jokingly refer to going up to feed and water the plants.  Referencing the fact that the unfortunate patients resembled members of the vegetable family and only needed to be turned and watered. (turned to prevent bed sores and have IV fluids changed.)

My current secretary just lost her Ex-husband and father to her two kids to the same oversight.  I can only imagine that it has to be a fundamental lack of gray matter or basic IQ to think that your head is harder than a concrete road bed when impacting it  in excess of 50 miles per hour.

If you think it is safe to ride a motorcycle without a helmet.  Get an egg and drop it from about 3 feet.  The terminal velocity (velocity at which falling rate equals drag) won't be large but what do you think will happen to the egg.  Now throw another egg at the ground at about 50 mile per hour.  You think you'll be walking away if it were your head?

 

If you want to feel the air going through your hair, get a convertible.

I think it is Darwin's Natural Selection at work.