it is almost a pre-requisite for a doctor to have bad hand-writing. most nurses who are newly ingrained into the health-care system spend half their time trying to decipher the curves and dots of a doctor's penmanship. when i just started out being a registered nurse, i remember pondering why a doctor wanted to give a male patient the 'breast' treatment available in radiation oncology in a referral letter. that garnered a few laughs, until you realize that it wasted a lot of precious nursing-care minutes that you could put to much better use like giving the best possible care to your patients.

the nursing reports are one of those things that nurses do everyday. depending on the number of patients you have, your report could be as short as the brother's (as pictured; though i think he was just randomly taking notes) or be like mine (as pictured much further below). i'm actually very proud of the system that i've come up to take my notes. not that it's an original one. but it's what we're sorta taught in nursing school plus a few of my own ideas to git. it's elegant, simple and stylish. and most importantly it's to the point, with plenty of blank spaces to add in personal notes like 'he's hot!' (medical terms: he has a fever) or 'he's such a sweet guy!' (medical terms: he has diabetes) or 'he has such a big dick' (medical terms: he has such a big dick).

of course, some of the nurses pass horrible reports, especially the china female ones who's accents are as thick as 3 years' worth of the China yellow pages. you need to filter the vocal cords and the translations several times through a machine that processes them are 1.9 million gigabytes/second for at least 3 years before you can decipher 'an-china pet-tor-wrist' to be 'angina pectoris'. sometimes, if all the other people i work with in my assigned room are chinese, i ask them to speak in their mother tongue instead. which is pretty kewl, because along the way i get to learn loads of useful chinese terms like 'kang shen shu' (antibiotics) and 'dian liao' (radiation therapy) and 'nei ge' (that one - referring to the penis).

it's even better though when my entire bunch of co-workers for the day are all cheena -piang Singaporeans. cos the words chee bye and lan jiao come in really handy here.

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