Why It Sucks to Have a Mom as a Nurse

Some of you may have seen those Memes that say things like, “I’m sorry mommy’s a nurse and you had to bring yourself in because she thinks you should just suck it up” and yeah, I’m one of those moms/nurses. My oldest a couple years back twisted his ankle and I made him sit out a couple games, and ice it…telling him to suck it up. Well it didn’t get better and my husband, a layman, thought I should take him in. Turns out it was nerve damage and he needed some PT. He kept asking the physical therapist to say to me, ‘you suck as a mom and a nurse’ – yeah, they BOTH had fun with that.

 Jake, icing his foot

A couple weeks ago my younger son rode his bike to swim practice (in flip-flops) and was driven home before practice even started by one of the younger coaches (a teenager). His toe was bleeding but he seemed really nonchalant. The teen-coach looked ill. I sighed and told Isaac to run upstairs, get me some Band-Aids, and wash his foot with soap and water. The teen-coach assured me he rinsed Isaac’s foot off with hydrogen peroxide. I felt the need to give him a lecture that evidence-based-practice has pretty much proven hydrogen peroxide is a horrible idea and that in the future he should just use soap and water. He tells me that’s what they taught him in teen-life-guard-school and I replied, “well maybe they should get some one who isn’t using antiquated information”….. I couldn’t just shut up and the look on this kid’s face was like “geeze lady, I’m a teen-coach who just drove your bloody kid home shouldn’t you be doing something for him since you’re a nurse and all instead of lecturing me”. But in my head, my kid was FINE and could suck it up (which is probably why my kid wasn’t crying and washing his foot like I told him to). Teen coach left and I took a look at Isaac’s foot, after he washed it off….and ‘yikes’. It looked like a flap of skin was coming off, which they can’t stitch, but there was some pretty bad gashes. So I took him into the ER.

"oh my gosh mom, stop taking my pictures and posting on Facebook"

ER nurse and ER doc were like, “Whoa Dude, never ride your bike in flip flops, that looks bad” After X-rays, Lidocaine shots (which he did NOT like), and a tourniquet it was decided stitches weren’t going to help but they did need to cauterize to stop bleeding. Isaac, a true Walking Dead fan says to me “I just need to look at the flowers”. The ER doc, also a Walking Dead fan laughed – which scared me just a bit since he was holding the cauterizer. Then says, ‘you know the thing about that show is that every doctor on there is a total wack job’ (FYI Wack apparently is NOT a word that word check recognizes, so I ask Jason, how do you spell wack as in wack job, and he asks, you aren’t charting are you? – and no, but wouldn’t that be fun to actually say, this family is full of freakin’ wack jobs…oh wait, maybe it’s whack …ah yes, that computes…keeping my original mistake here though to let you into to my scary ADD mind --- squirrel). So I bring up, “yeah, like Grey’s Anatomy never has a nurse in the rooms with the doctors and the doctors are doing everything nurses do”…so we start complaining about how shows just don’t show the medical field appropriately and Isaac is lying in his ER stretcher rolling his eyes at us.

X-rays...doesn't he look thrilled

So no swimming for 10 days. And we got a prescription for 30 vicodin…seriously for a 12 year old who was rating his pain at 1/10 – probably because he’s learned from a very young age what suck it up really means. I briefly thought of filling the prescription and selling it just to pay for the co-pay….but that would be illegal and bad and I don’t know anyone who would buy them (although also briefly thought of asking my high school nurse friend because I’m sure she’d know who was dealing at the local high school…but again, illegal, bad and contributing to a minor doing bad and illegal things). So it went unfilled and I threw some Advil at the kid.

The ER nurse, admitted how much she loves Pinterest and decided to make a Pinterest-craft-ready-dressing -- she did an awesome job.

Jason, had already volunteered to be a timer at the swim meet so he went and when asked by another parent who his kid was, he explained about the ‘injury’ and the parent was like, ‘oh I heard about him, they thought he lost his toe it was so bad’

Really? Bunch of babies.