Nurses Are A Special Kind Of Breed

Today, I want to take the opportunity to apologize to my non-medical friends and family for all of the awkward and uncomfortable situations I may have created due to my personality and proclivity for telling nursing stories at the wrong time or forgetting that not everyone thinks like I do. I realize that those of us who work in healthcare on the daily are a different breed of people and that our macabre sense of humor often seems tone-deaf or inappropriate. This might come as a surprise to you, but I fit in perfectly with my colleagues.

For example, last week, I found myself masked up, standing in line at the grocery store and I noticed a gentleman with the MOST GORGEOUS ARMS. He obviously worked out and his muscles were pretty nice, but the most beautiful thing about these arms was the big, meaty veins. I was really mesmerized and thought long and hard about how easy it would be to tap that vein for a blood draw or fluids. It took all of my strength not to palpate that bad boy. I told one of my favorite nurse friends about my experience and she asked for photos. I also related my tale to a friend who teaches for a living and she looked at me like I had a third eye growing out of my forehead. See, we are just different.

In nursing school, my classmates and I harassed our family and friends alike to let us palpate their pedal pulse (still a toughie in some cases), perform head-to-toe assessments, and take their blood pressure. Even now, all these years later, I take every opportunity to assess the people I am spending time with, although I am usually a little less obvious about it.

Nurses are always the ones ruining dinner conversations with tales of guts and gore and bodily fluids. We don’t even realize we are ruining the appetites of our non-medical companions because that stuff is just normal conversation for us. I have been called out in the past for giving play by plays of fecal impaction relief over chocolate pudding. I honestly didn’t understand the issue.

Essentially, we cannot be trusted to be socially adept once we’ve made the full transition from layperson to healthcare professional. We will ask to see pictures of your wounds pre and post stitch. We will ask for the gruesome details of your recent surgery. We will ask if you kept your kidney stone or wisdom teeth post-extraction. We are socially awkward AF and we are not sorry about it. We do feel bad that we create some uncomfortable situations, but our curiosity is insatiable and we can’t turn it off.

If you are a friend of a nurse, but not medically inclined yourself, you are a special kind of friend to tolerate our quirks. We are going to slip inappropriate comments to you at funerals and wakes, but we don’t mean any harm. We are going to go into way too much detail about meconium in amniotic fluid just as someone serves you your split pea soup. We are going to text you photos of infected, weeping wounds, but only because we want to share, much like your cat drops that dead mouse on your doorstep every so often. These are our gifts and we are sharing them with you.