Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

Thank you, Abraham Lincoln, for providing the title for this post about birth. Of course, he wasn't actually talking about birth, but I am. Four or five years ago, back in nursing school, my classmates of approximately 40, all women, and I were in a class about birth. We had a presenter come talk about natural births. And she asked the question, how many of you would consider NOT getting an epidural, would choose to have a natural birth. I was the only one. And we were only talking about considering  a natural birth. This totally blew my mind. A lot of my classmates really liked the obstetrics rotation. We love babies. But I might have been alone in disliking the clinicals. I thought the entire mother/baby rotation in the hospital was pretty...unnecessary. Most of the time, I'd be looking through a magazine, waiting for a mother to dilate or efface. The mother would be on her back in a hospital bed with a fetal monitor strapped to her abdomen, which limited movement, not ...

I believe four factors contribute to the necessity of maturity in nursing: 1) We are working with the human body. 2) Nurses tend to be female 3) Patients tend to be male, usually older, with less of a filter, and 4) Being in an unfamiliar environment on drugs for pain and not in control of the course of disease lead to overall emotional discomfort Some patients express this emotional discomfort by trying to regain control of care, e.g. clamping and disconnecting tubes leading from the lung cavity to a drain [My conversation went something like  Do not ever do that, I understand you have a background as a medic, but you are not responsible for that drain. Your doctor is. ] or pulling out bladder catheters and then deciding we might be mad at him for doing that, so putting it back in and taping it ALL OVER (read between the lines) to make it stay [I didn't have a conversation for that one. I was too shocked for words; when I was sent in to take the catheter out, he had to use s...

I sincerely hope that thoughts really do count; I have been thinking about blogging this post for three weeks now. I wonder if the longer I think about it, the more it counts... I journeyed once again to Utah last month to visit my parents. When my dad picked me up from the airport, he told me that he took a healthy challenge to drink 3 green smoothies that week, so could I make 3 green smoothies during my visit? I suspect he would have chosen a different challenge if I hadn't visited. Really, though, I had a blast. We went to see Man of la Mancha, which was absolutely riveting. We also saw Fiddler on the Roof (which was really cold, as it was up in Sundance), and I got to thinking. I think Latter-day Saints should come up with a musical as funny, poignant, and culturally appropriate as that play is for Jewish people. Although since I've never been Jewish, I am making an educated assumption. That's my dad's ear. He didn't want to be in the picture The st...