Give me your tired, your poor, your unwashed masses...

Sometimes I post these stories about patients and it's because they were challenging or they really got to me on a gut level. Or I get on a soapbox about some injustice of American healthcare or angst about the nature of impermanence and the finality that we have bodies that decay and die and blah blah blah.

Today? Two of my three patients are just irritating.

I do not have large breasts. I barely have fair to middling sized breasts. I accepted the fact long ago that they just weren't gonna grow any bigger and have moved on. They make cute bras my size, and I haven't had much trouble finding men who mind 'fair to middling', so I don't really care. ...So why the hell Mr. A's hand has to keep brushing against my boobs is not only puzzling, it's pathetic. As in: THAT's all it takes to titillate (sorry) your fancy? These? GOD, you're a loser.

He's geriatric and has nothing better to do and perhaps I should adjust my point of view to see from bodhichitta, but he's just a dirty old bastard. Yes, he's a human being with complex issues of aging and he inappropriately expresses his agonally breathing virility out of feelings of powerlessness and ....nah.... I can't even do that, he's just a dirty old fsck, period.

It's not even worth telling him to stop it because it 'makes me feel uncomfortable and is inappropriate'. It doesn't make me feel uncomfortable, it is simply annoying. I roll my eyes and swat his hand away in a most politically-incorrect fashion. Fortunately, he's not so adolescent as to giggle. He just tries again.

He enjoys flashing up his hospital gown, too. Shows off that sexy urostomy in technicolor. He thinks I'm real smart for a nurse. Not like the others. Most of em are really dumb, you know.

No. I didn't know. But thanks.

Miss B is a gem, too. To Mr. A, I am Bad Porno Cliche Nurse and Miss B sees me as the concierge. Scratch that. I'm the laundry girl. Like so many post-op hearts, she's sedentary by nature. She had major surgery ergo she cannot possibly pour her own water from her jug. She must hold my hand while walking when she is not unsteady at all. I must lift her in her bed after she lays down upon it in a caddywhompus fashion because she couldn't possibly, you know, ROLL THE FSCK OVER HERSELF.

Can you tell I'm irritated?

Today's drama was that she took a shower at 1900, and wanted a hair dryer. We don't have hair dryers in the ICU. We don't even have massage tables or pedicure kits. We're a crappy-ass ICU. This is a geriatric woman who, well, doesn't have a lot of hair. This is Colorado and it's dry. "I'm going to catch cold." I'm sweating bullets in her 90 degree room and I do not think I have enough magnanimousness in me to wipe the plaintative look off my face. Much less explain that "catching cold" has zero to do with having wet hair, no matter what your mother told you.

I'm sure she hates me.

I touch her hair. "Miss B, it feels dry to me. All I can offer you is another towel." I hand her another towel. "But I really want a hairdryer." "I really do not have one."

She called up a friend who drove 45 minutes to bring a hairdryer. She actually used it. On her then-dry hair.

I is smart fo a nurse.

I is a B cup and I has no hairdryer.

Yesterday was a full moon, and the saline in everybody's brain is being shifted by some tide somewhere. I am sleep-deprived. I am working too much. And that is all this is.

/jo

p.s. Bella is not much better, but FELV, FIV both negative. We're doing subQ LR at home, antibiotics and I don't know what to do next. DVM is saying possible hospitalization c IVF, CXR and ABD xray. I'm gonna wait and see with the SQ fluids and me feeding her by hand (cos she isn't interested in eating anything herself). She's losing weight fast. So...some good news, but the bad news is I still don't know why, and she's not getting better yet.

I SO do not want to be here tonight. I want to be home, tending to my cat, feeding her q2. My cat who loves me and doesn't even like hairdryers. I don't wanna be here with these crazy fscks.