Nurse Incognito

in⋅cog⋅ni⋅to

–adjective

1.	having one's identity concealed, as under an assumed name, esp. to avoid notice or formal attentions.

So most of you know that up until March, I worked as an ER nurse. If it's okay with you, I'd like to keep that kind of hush-hush.

You see, it doesn't really work to my benefit now that I'm on the patient side of things. Actually, between you and me, I hated being the nurse of a nurse (as in, I'm the nurse assigned to a patient who is also a nurse). Well, some of them were cool. But some of them weren't. The worst was being the nurse of a medical assistant. I always knew I was dealing with a medical assistant because they would drop gazillions of hints -


"Hello, I'm Meredith and I'm going to be your nurse tonight. How are you feeling?"

"Hypovolemic."

"Really? That's too bad. Is your shoulder bothering you? You seem to be in pain."

"Yes, it hurts right by the [pause for effect] suprascapular notch."

"I see...when did you first notice it?"

"When I got home at 5 this morning...I had to work four midnights in a row [sigh]."



They would never just come right out and tell me. They would just toss a little medical jargon in there and make increasingly obvious hints. It was as if they were hoping I would notice their bizarre comments and exclaim, "Wow! You must have a medical background because I can tell that you speak-a-my-language with a vocabulary like that! Where do you work?" I guess I'm kind of a brat because I always played stupid...I mean, how many professions are there that work "midnights"? But I would always just smile and nod and wait for them to spill the beans.

But I digress.

Well, I've done a pretty good job of keeping my identity concealed at the pediatrician's office. But I might have let it slip yesterday. Oops.

Yesterday, Keri had a checkup and the nurse giving her second shot was rushing (the crying from the first shot was already in full swing) and underestimated the chubbiness of her thighs and so the needle tip sort of bounced and skidded across her thigh and most of its contents squirted on my knuckle. So Keri had a scrape, no big deal. The nurse was totally embarassed but I tried to be gracious and told her not to worry about it. I did mention to her that some of the vaccine got on my knuckle and asked if she needed to have it repeated. The nurse told me "Oh, she definitely got it" and I tried to rephrase my concern. We cleaned up the blood and I started dressing Keri and the nurse was about to leave and so I said, again, "I hate to be a pain, but I really don't think she got most of the shot...I know it's a pretty small amount...I really don't mind at all if she needs another shot." She then said, "I know it doesn't look like much, but there's actually quite a bit in there." I couldn't resist at this point...so I might have mentioned something about me being a nurse and about 0.5 ml not being exactly "quite a bit". But I was nice. I promise. She wouldn't budge. I think she was just too embarassed to admit we had just grazed a perfect little chubby thigh for no good reason at all...

Oh well. I decided to just let it go at this point. I mean it's not a life-or-death issue.

Here's that once-perfect-chubby-little-thigh:

[Warning: Graphic photo posted below.]



Okay, so that was before we cleaned it up. I actually am not even that bothered by the blood or scrape part...I just kind of wanted my daughter properly vaccinated. On a brighter note, it would seem that my knuckle is now protected from measles, mumps, and rubella.