One fact exists: if professions were ranked with the comicality of instruction and advice shared among the students, nursing would be number one. Let’s start with the name of the association itself: school of “nursing”. It is the only school whose name is a verb, unlike school of medicine.
However, teaching and learning should not be 100 percent professional as we all need some comic relief. When it comes to instruction, nursing school has millions of witticisms that hardly reach the public for ethical and professional reason. Nursing school has the capacity to supply unlimited comical lines from the past to the future. Here are 7 funny pieces of advice that I was told in nursing school.
- One of the most rib cracking pieces of advice, is in catheterization procedure. As a novice student nurse, one, usually, has a sense of fear. Holding someone’s manhood the first time to insert a catheter can be worrisome. Worrisome it may be but nursing students have to make it cheerful in some way. One of the students, in demonstrating the procedure, advised to hold the organ as if you own it, while inserting the catheter. To date, it is still ingrained in my mind as a practicing nurse.
- A nurse is expected to have trimmed nails. This allows better and safer performance of many procedures on our patients. When I first heard this, I thought it had a deep reason, until she uttered the last part of the statement. “All nurses should have trimmed nails for efficiency in performance of the procedure. One finger should have a pointy nail to break the blisters.” Nasty, right?
- Another hilarious piece of advice managed to get its way into the intensive care unit. Before the next handover, every nurse is advised to get into the bathroom and loosen their bladder. It is known that the next chance you will get will be after ten hours of intensive care with patients.
- Nursing school can form an amphitheater of numerous jokes. One student, while giving instruction on how to give suppositories decided to inform us that we should use a double-gloved hand while delving in human cesspools. Not only funny but I always took this advice as a great idea.
- While one male nurse was pampering his ego (of course he should be a gentleman), he said that nurses should not suffer from low self-esteem because they are equally important. Up to that point he was correct in his statement. To validate his importance as a nurse, he said, “They too are like surgeons. They cut off the hair before the surgery is done.”
- Some advice in my first year of nursing I found rather critical to the profession. One of the students came in with his own definition of being a nurse. He downplayed the importance by saying, “a nurse is any person who can eat lunch with fecal matter on their hands.” Very nauseating! Others have immersed fecal matter with other names such as “cord brown” just to make the process of joke-cracking less nauseating.
- A final but useful piece of advice for all new nurses that I received was to always remember that digital thermometers are read as ‘Hi’ and never ‘Heeeyyyy!’