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: Random Ramblings About Life and Law School

"You're too smart to be a nurse.

You should be a doctor!"

Why do people think this is a compliment? Since when are nurses dumb? Would you want a dumb nurse? In searching the internet for other nurses' thoughts, I found a blogger who put it better than I ever have: Lucid. She said "I don't want to be a doctor because I want to be a nurse".

A couple of months ago, we had a little girl come in to the office with her mom and her mom's new husband, Newbie. Newbie is a local doctor who, to be fair, has a reputation for being a major league dirtbag. Anyway, because the girl was coming in for a recheck of her asthma, I put the pulse oximeter on her finger to get her pulse and oxygen level while I used the "forehead" thermometer to get her temperature. After using those two cool little pieces of technology, I put the old-fashioned manual blood pressure cuff on her arm. As I was inflating the cuff, Newbie said to me "Oh, thank God you can do something!"

I stopped dead in my tracks and just looked at him, completely at a loss for words. Seeing my reaction, he then tried to backtrack: "Well, I mean with all that equipment, if you didn't know how to take a blood pressure I'd wonder what they're teaching you in school nowadays!"

Now, I have no idea what he thought I was, but at best he thought I was a brand new, inexperienced nurse (if he thought I was a nurse at all)! I've since forgotten what I said to him, but what I do remember is what I wish I had said: "Well, in nursing school they taught us how to assess a situation, critical thinking, problem solving... actually, pretty much the same things they teach us in law school!"

But I didn't.

I'm not one to throw stuff around like that. Things like what you do for a living or where you went to school don't make any of us better than anyone else. But boy, did I want to throw that in his face. He was sitting there all smug in his sense of intellectual superiority to me, assuming that I was probably a brand new medical assistant. I would have LOVED to have burst that bubble. But I didn't. Because I'm a good nurse.

Dammit.

Full post as published by Random Ramblings About Life and Law School on November 22, 2008 (boomark / email).