Just One More Reason

I don't hate nursing anymore. I used to when I would work 12 hour shifts for six days in a row only to spend the next week recovering and dreading going back. Now, however, I have recovered from the burnout and actually enjoy my job. There are a lot of reasons why I enjoy going to work these days. This blog entry is NOT about one of them...quite the contrary. This entry is about something I hope I never see again...which is why I have to share it with anyone willing to read this mess.

A guy should change his socks, say, at minimum of , oh, I don't know, every 3 days? I'm being generous here I know. Customarily I change them every day as I'm sure do most of you. Rarely I'll go 2 days if I haven't done the laundry in a while and I'm in a jam (toe jam?). Three days is really over the edge and done by the desperate few who find themselves on a long backpacking journey. But even these folks find a stream somewhere and rinse out the sweat and funk from days of hiking so they can sleep at night in the enclosed space of a tent. I mean, has your own foul odor ever awakened you in the middle of the night... when you roll over and that little puff of air shoots out of your sleeping bag and hits like the sour gasses of a compost heap? It's disturbing to think that your own smell can wake you up. It doesn't jolt you awake like a thunderbolt but insinuates itself into your consciousness just enough for you to do three things: 1. Stop all movement. 2. Pull your arms out of the sleeping bag and put a vapor lock on the top edge to keep all future gasses IN the bag. and 3. Promise to yourself and God that you'll do laundry first thing in the morning. When I was a teenager I'd come up to San Juan Island every summer and stay with my sister Samantha. She had an awesome dog and I just loved it. That Dog (a mid-sized pointer mind you) would crawl into my mummy bag and down to my feet every night and we'd sleep together wrestling for leg room all night long. But after a summer of sweaty boy smell, dirty feet smell and dog smell my sleeping bag would out gas and stink like a laundry basket and dirty dog pillow with top notes of old wet sponge. It was a wonder I could crawl into the thing by the end of the summer but it's amazing what one can get used to.
Which brings me around to what I wanted to write about in the first place. My job...or more specifically my shift the other night. As I said, it is amazing what one can get used to and my patient in room 4 had got used to things no one ever should. STOP! As I write this I'm realizing that no one needs to read about all the detailed horrors of the human condition. There are things better left unwritten (most of my blogs some might say!) and what started out seeming like an excellent gross out subject for blogging about now seems just really sad. So I'll do what I should have started a long time ago and self edit. No need to continue today's great story of another person's suffering. There is way too much sadness and loneliness (and the physical fallout from all that pain) in the world. Help alleviate it in any small way. Thanks for reading. But I did like reminiscing about my smelly summers with Samantha on San Juan.