Thursday Thirteen #38

Thirteen Things about The skills and abilities you might not know a nurse needs! My first Thursday Thirteen for a while is about the skills that I would never have known I needed to be a good nurse, but now I am older and wiser know that are vital.

1. The ability to not look shocked when you are told something shocking, shown something unpleasant or had something extremely noxious placed under your nose.
2. The ability not to throw up when someone hands you their artificial eye, false teeth caked in food or open sputum pot.
3. The ability to hold your breath without anyone noticing as you deal with other unpleasant bodily fluids.
4. The ability to act as if piles and piles of paper, boxes and other debris is the most normal thing to find filling up a person’s house.
5. The ability to smile and act as if you have not a care in the world when you move a patient into a bed just vacated by someone you had to lay out.
6. The ability to get the job done in the shortest time without the patient knowing you don’t have all the time in the world.
7. The ability to smile at someone who has just intimated that you are the monkey to the doctor’s organ grinder, when actually you would like to give them an injection with the biggest gage needle possible.
8. The ability to help a new doctor learn their job – perhaps you should get that patient flat before you start CPR is one that springs to mind.
9. The ability to understand that while most nurses show a caring nature towards their patients, they are much less tolerant of their colleagues, particularly those that have the audacity to be sick or go on leave.
10. The ability not to feel obliged to tell students and more junior staff that they have things easier than you ever did. After all in my day we had to work full time, study and whats more we were left to run the wards while the staff nurses skived in the office with the doctors and generally did very little (not sure that is true, but it is the kind of thing people say)
11. The ability to recognise that change is inevitable, constant if not continuous.
12. The knowledge that what you have learned by the time you take your state finals (as they were called when I took them) is not going to be enough to see you through the rest of your career.
13. The knowledge that much as you love nursing, that it is ok to want to go into management or education. That you will still be a nurse, because once a nurse then you are always a nurse.

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