When I was young nurses in the United States were angels in white. Paper boat caps, dresses with more starch than cotton, white hose and big, heavy, white shoes. For women, if you weren’t a nurse the only white dress shoes you ever wore were on your wedding day. Women could wear white tennis shoes or boaters but they weren’t fooling anybody.
Then, without warning, hospitals became pajama parties. Everybody who works there is dressed the same. And you can’t call what they’re wearing clothes. Maybe in India or some cable stoner space show. They take your clothes and give you an ass out so that they can feel “dressed” and superior. It’s all about control. They don’t have time to argue with you so they take your pants.
I know, you’re screaming “How could you forget the school nurse?” The professional who can not do anything for you except extend a bandaid or loan you a tampon. (I needed one for a nosebleed once.) At a time when gym teachers were performing hysterectomies and circumcisions in after school athletics those RNs who had signed up to be hog tied by regulations knew they were the last line of sanity in school systems that were basically functioning like diarrhea on fire.
Slowly, again without notice, doctors offices became miniature scrub hubs. More rooms and machines and needles and god awful things that go there and god not there! And charts and farts and Smiley faces and purple rhino stickers on the bathroom doors. Paper shoes had migrated from the horror movie third floors of the castles of hope to the guy who used to have an office next to his kitchen where his nurse wife was cooking and made house calls with a little black bag. Now you walk in with a bad paper cut and they’re taking blood samples to send to NASA.
The beauties and battle-axes portrayed on TV now look like high tech fairy god mothers and prom queens from Mars. But however they attire they are dressed as warriors.
Sunday the 10th is Mother’s Day and Nurse’s Day is Tuesday the 12th. And that is just how it should be. Where mothers care leaves off or is not enough nurses step in and stay with us all until we’re good or gone. Not all nurses are women and many, perhaps most, do not have all the training and accreditation. They’re just there. Here. Where we need them and we may have never needed them more than we do now.
Why does Superman wear a cape?
Because when he was created only the French Police and nurses everywhere wore capes.
Fuck the zombies. They never had a chance.
Don Arrup
Satire1
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