No, she’s not a new fangled nurse. Just a pseudo waitress that I took a picture of in Stockholm.

But there doesn’t seem to be all that much difference between waitresses and nurses, in the eyes of many. Hospital administrators and many patients act like nurses are there to “serve” and then disgruntled when the service isn’t instant or to their liking.

Meals? Well, if the soup is cold the nurse is blamed. Take ti back, they bark, as if they’re in a restaurant. “I want something else. Where’s the menu?”

Some patients, who are quite capable of getting up and out of bed, and who would benefit from the mobility, keep their damn finger on the call button. “Can you bring me a cup of tea? With lemon and sugar?”

“I want a new pillow case. I don’t like the color.”

“Can you refill my pitcher? The ice is starting to melt. Well, I know I just asked you to refill it five minutes ago, but you didn’t put in enough ice.”

Both waitresses and nurses get paid hourly, and from what I can tell, many hospitals require nurses to punch a time clock! How demeaning does it get? A nurse is supposed to be a professional, but having a time clock shows that these esteemed professionals cannot be trusted to be honest about time worked.

And at least, a waitress gets tips.

I’m not sure why I chose to write about this today, except that its the Christmas season, and a lot of nurses would have loved to have been off, but instead, had to come in and punch the time clock. And got no appreciation from patients or administrators (the administrators were at home stuffing their faces and getting drunk) for working on a holiday. One friend of mine, who does per diem work at a nursing home, says that they have managed to find a way around giving holiday time to workers such as herself. Lovely.

What a wonderful Christmas Day. It was snowing this morning, making this the first real white Christmas in my part of the world since 1990. The temperature is still only 30 degrees, but the snow has been melting during the course of the day–I think it did inch up above freezing for a little while. But now it is misting over, and I think something wet is going to start coming down from the clouds again. There is still a lot of snow on the ground, and ice, but they’re predicting that it will melt away by the weekend.

And for those of you who don’t celebrate Christmas, then I hope you enjoyed whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year. Or will enjoy whatever is coming up!

If you’ve been reading the news, you can see that President-elect Barack Obama is putting together a very impressive team to help him lead the nation. A team of knowledgeable, intelligent and experienced people who can help him erase the damage of the Bush era, and give our nation back its greatness.

His potential choice of the surgeon general is Dr. Gail Rousseau, a neurosurgeon who was an early Obama supporter and hosted a fundraiser for him at her home in 2003. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I would prefer that he select someone with a broader expertise in public health. I don’t know anything about her, but neurosurgery seems very limited–it is something that is highly specialized so I don’t know how that translates into being the public health advocate for the nation. True, the Surgeon General doesn’t have much power, but again, neurosurgery is extremely specialized and unless this woman does a lot of advocacy and research in her spare time,  I can’t see how this is the best choice.

Of course, it is nice that a woman is being considered, and if confirmed, she will be only the third woman to fill the slot. And of greater interest, is that she was a surgical nurse before going to medical school.

Yes, a nurse.

I know that nurse purists will be outraged that this woman dared to leave the sacred calling of nursing and attend medical school, but that’s the reality. Nurses leaving nursing, for any number of reasons. And while I’m sure the nurse purists will scoff at her as a traitor, I think that it is impressive that she rose from nurse to neurosurgeon to possibly being confirmed as surgeon general.

Then again, one of our most effective surgeon generals was Everett Koop, who was a pediatric surgeon, but yet he stepped up to the plate to battle the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s (which the Reagan administration did its best to ignore, but that’s another story).

Anyway, there may be other contenders, but the reason I even posted this was because of her nursing background.

George Bush just keeps on giving. The man is history, and has exactly 1 month and day left as president in this country. But you know, its Christmas, and GWB is the gift that just keeps on giving.

His latest idiocy and insult to this country is the “conscience law” which allow health care providers to refuse to dole out treatment that is contrary to their conscience. The major problem with this law is that it is so broad that virtually anyone working in health care can invoke it. For example, a receptionist who feels that sterilization is morally wrong can refuse to schedule an appointment for a man to get a vasectomy. A nursing assistant can refuse to give a bedbath to a gay man, or change his bedpan if she feels that homosexuality is wrong and the man is a sinner and doesn’t deserve to be cared for.

The list is endless. But what is missing from this scenario is the patient. Healthcare is supposed to evolve around the patient, not the provider. If you work in healthcare, you better get used to people coming at you from all walks of life.

When I worked in the NICU, we had many families that made my flesh crawl. Like the 27 year old woman with a 14 year old daughter giving birth to her 10th kid. All with different fathers, on welfare–well, you get the picture. I’d personally like to snip her tubes, but the best we could do was counsel her, and take care of her baby. Get social services involved to make sure that the baby whose life we worked so hard to save would be cared for.

From USA Today:

Under the rule, which takes effect mid-January, anyone from the brain surgeon to the pharmacy cashier can opt out of participating in care to which they have a moral or religious objection. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt described it as a rule to protect “the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience.”

The Family Research Council calls the rule “an early Christmas present to pro-lifers” which will “reinforce the rights of doctors, pharmacists, technicians, and even receptionists …

Protecting the right of all health care providers to make professional judgments based on their moral convictions is foundational to federal law. The next administration will inherit these rules, and we strongly urge President-elect Obama to defend them. True tolerance would allow the choice of conscience to be defined by individuals — not the government.

Are these people daft or what? Health care providers are supposed to make decisions based on standard practice, science, and the needs/wants of the patient. Not their moral convictions, which should play no part in any healthcare decision making because they can be in direct conflict with what the patient wants.

Well the Family Research Council must be drinking spiked Kool-Aid if they think that Obama is going to defend this assault on healthcare. Hopefully Congress will block it immediately, so that Obama doesn’t have to deal with it. Senators Clinton and Murray have already introduced a bill to repeal it.

Women seeing reproductive health care, gay individuals and couples dealing with emergencies or even routine treatment, even people who see vaccines or antibiotics for their babies will face health care roulette on all fronts. Who knows the beliefs of the triage nurse in the ER?

What the defenders of this law don’t realize is that it can affect them. Their brain is focused on abortion or emergency contraception, but little do they know that they can be a victim of moral conscience. Gee, what if a nurse invokes her Jehovah Witness status and refuses to give them blood? Maybe they can bleed to death? Or if the pharmacist refuses to fill their prescription for a drug he considers “objectionable” such as a painkiller, and he’s the only open one in town. Tough luck, kiddo, you’ll have to suffer all night.

People who are carrying around too much moral baggage should not be working in health care, or at least, choose a niche where it won’t be a problem.

Under this law, even a cashier can refuse to ring you up, if they don’t like what you’re buying. Gee, they think deodorant is immoral, hiding the natural scent that God gave you. Oh my, you should not be buying tampons–how icky.

Merry Christmas, George Bush. How about giving the nation a present and resigning now? Just remember, what goes around comes around. Wait until you’re sick, and the health care team refuses to care for you, saying that it is against their conscience to care for a mass murderer….

Photo courtesy of Clipartguide.com

So now what does a snowy scene have to do with anything? By the way, this is how the world looks outside my front door.

We are having an unprecedented cold spell, with below freezing temperatures and lovely snow which will not turn black and sotty as it does in the city. True, I may be less than enamored with with the snow if I had to drive somewhere, which leads me to the subject of the day.

I only worked one year as a nurse in a climate where weather conditions could hamper travel. Other than that, I worked in Florida and California. I was fortunate during my brief interlude in sunny buggy Florida not to bump heads with any hurricanes, and working in California was also benign, weather wise.

But I was thinking today, as I took a walk in the winter wonderland, in my bright red snowboots and red gloves, what I would do if I had to report to work at a hospital? Well, it wasn’t much of a brain bender–I would not show up. The roads here are minimally cleared, although it gets better as you get into downtown. But without chains, I surely would not attempt to drive in my neighborhood. Since heavy snow is quite uncommon, most people tend not to keep chains in their garage or have a set of snow tires. Many do have SUVs, but some of those were even slip-sliding today.

How devoted do hospitals think that nurses are? Do they expect you to risk your life to get to work? Really, do they get their knickers in a twist if you call in and say, sorry, I am snowed in? I understand that patients need care, but still. Of course, hospitals could hire transportation to come and pick up nurses (and bring them home) in inclement weather, but that will be the day….

So I’m curious–what do they expect? Do they threaten you if you call in? Would I get fired if I explained that the roads are not cleared, they are slick as glass beneath the snow, and that the bus has reverted to “snow route” meaning that I would have to walk a mile and a half in below freezing temperatures with heavy snowfall to get to the bus stop?

Sorry for the interruption, but I was on the road for a medical conference, and even though I assumed that I would have plenty of time to blog (famous last words), I didn’t. Down time was spent chilling out and trying to do a little Christmas shopping and going out a bit on the town.

It looks like End of Days back home, with dark dreary mornings that get no brighter as the day wears on. Rain, rain and more rain. And now an Arctic front is moving into the Pacific Northwest and bringing temping below freezing. Yes, I know, I’m wimpy. Much of the world deals with bone chilling weather and piles of snow all winter. But one of the reasons I live here is because I like moderation, as in a moderate winter.

But on the other hand, they predicted snow last night and I woke up this morning all eager to see that white fairy dust on the ground, but nada. Zilch. It didn’t snow.

However it was rather chilly out, and ice patches appeared on both decks as the day wore on and the temperature dropped. I brought some of the more vulnerable plants inside and into the garage, and some were already partially frozen. I hope that they will survive. Some of those geraniums did survive a prolonged snowfall in Seattle, where they were stuck in a windowbox.

Anyway, I have a lot of stuff to blog about–all kinds of good juicy nursing stuff. Definately not of the goody two shoes variety. Stay tuned.

This is as bizarre an opening paragraph as I’ve ever seen. This article is about nurses and smoking, and a study that was done to examine the “devastating” effects of cigarettes on this population.

From the UCLA News Staff:

A new UCLA School of Nursing study is the first to reveal the devastating consequences of smoking on the nursing profession. Published in the November–December edition of the journal Nursing Research, the findings describe smoking trends and death rates among U.S. nursesand emphasize the importance of supporting smoking cessation programs in the nursing field.

So what are the devastating consequences of smoking on the nursing profession? Does smoking somehow affect women who are nurses differently from women in general? Does working as a nurse change the physiology of the human body?

The article says absolutely nothing about these devastating consequences, lest readers were biting at the bit to hear how cigarettes were somehow an underlying cause of the nursing shortage. Or that nurses had higher rates of lung cancer, smoked more than other women, or something, anything, to back up this lead in.

Here’s another profound quote:

“Nurses in the study demonstrated behavior patterns similar to women in the general population,” she added. “For example, the younger nurses in the study began smoking before entering the profession, a pattern reflected by American women starting smoking at younger ages in general. Being a nurse did not make these women immune to nicotine addiction.”

“It is encouraging to see that fewer and fewer nurses are smoking, but we can’t declare the problem solved,” said Michelle Larkin, senior program officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the UCLA team’s research. “The devastating effects of smoking are all too real for those nurses who still smoke. We need research to learn about the factors that lead them to smoke and more resources to help them quit.”