i can't help but get giddy with pride when i see my preceptee fast turning out to become a fine specimen of a Registered Nurse. and i have to say she's quite the charmer with all the male patients that she nurses in her line of work. to begin with, she's quite pleasing to the eye. she's as thin as the 'i' in thin. she's currently contributing to an orthodontist's pockets. and the defining factor about her that makes men (including the homosexual me) weak in their knees in that surreal air of helplessness and innocence about her. braces, innocence and a pretty face, what more could a man ask for?

i find myself irresistibly helping her when she starts getting panicky about her workload. it could be filling up forms, or writing reports or even changing a diaper. falling short of killing a patient, there's nothing that i wouldn't help my preceptee with. with regards to the panicky bit though, she's a bit of what we Singaporeans would define as a 'kancheong spider' - a person who gets flustered rather easily, especially at work. don't ask me why a spider because i can think of many other creatures roaming this planet that are more kancheong than a spider. like say... an ant threatened with a magnifying glass perhaps? and anyways, 'kancheong ant' just ain't got that oomph and pizazz to it.

all that said, i still feel rather satisfied with the way that my preceptee has turned out actually. come to think of it, this satisfaction is rather comparable to a father's pride and joy at seeing his daughter at her High School Graduation ceremony. well, not the mainstream father that you're thinking about that changes nappies, grounds his kids and brings them to gran's place during the weekends. but rather, a divorced father of sorts who realized that the vage just wasn't his cup of tea and that the only cups he preferred were the types shaped like athletic supports. you do realize that the divorced parent without custody of the kids always seems to be the cooler one, no? well, that's me teaching my kid/preceptee the deviant and realistic way of life.

my colleagues are the ones who uphold the law and teach my preceptee that right way to doing things. whereas i'm the one who teaches her the 'right' way of doing things with a pinch of salt and perhaps some chopped up spring onions for garnishing. you see, in the hectic working life of the typical registered nurse, there's simply too many things to be done. one could of course attempt to accomplish the daily tasks via the straight and the narrow, doing things by the book and constantly halting at the bureaucratic red tapes. but it's generally tedious and really not worth the current salary that they are paying us nurses.

which is why on top of teaching my preceptee the administrative and clinical stuff, i try to imbue in them a 'work smart' culture. not because it makes me look darn savvy and cool (it does actually), but because at the end of the day, it's not about how you get it done, but how much you get done. it's sad but the local nursing culture is more quantitative-inclined than qualitative. your performance and chances for scholarships and promotions are all judged by your 'productivity rate'. 'productivity rate' here referring to, of course, the number of sick leave you have taken in this work year alone. i have basically overshot my allotted amount and even eaten into my annual leave, all thanks to my tonsils.

my chances of promotion from Staff Nurse I to Staff Nurse II this year? kaput. thus i've decided that since i'm not gonna be going far this year, might as well help a few others up the career ladder. this is in the hope that there will be a lot of preceptees pulling me up the career ladder in the following work year. it's an altruistic act with selfish intents, which basically makes this an oxymoronic statement of sorts. but then again, i'm not exactly very light to begin with.
all the more i need to teach the preceptees some random lessons like these:

Life Lessons That Jon Teaches His Preceptees (part one)

1) Drawing lines yourself
my preceptee (braces, waif-like, innocence) started one morning shift with me several months ago. she was barely a week into ward life when she started to complain about how heavy the general workload in the ward was. there were phone calls to be made, diapers to be changed, urinals to be cleared and a whole lot of other pungent and smelly things to be done. most of which had to be followed-up with strict charting and report-writing. it just didn't make sense to her that one had to touch faecal matter and a pen after clearing up the shit (it doesn't make sense to me either).

'I feel so stressed!' she lamented to me, 'it's like i have to do everything!'

i was rather cranky because it was 7.20am in the morning, i had only four hours of sleep (insufficient) and i hadn't had any coffee to begin with. on a side note, i had had two sticks of cigarettes, just enough nicotine to jump start the registered nurse in me. i was mindlessly drawing out lines on A4-sized rough paper. i normally do this because it's not only therapeutic, but it's for work as well. i divide the paper into twelve boxes - twelve patients under my care - for jotting down notes when the previous shift passes over their reports later on.

'You know, you need to stop complaining about how heavy the work load is and start focusing on how you can resolve the work!'

'But how?!' she gasped, 'there's just so much to do and so little time!'

that was when the crankiness hit me like a gorilla armed with a sledgehammer. and in jon's brain, crankiness, wit and spring onion garnishings are very good sex buddies.

'Okay, take this piece of report that i'm drawing out now. it's rather tiresome drawing lines when you've only slept less than the official eight hours and haven't had any coffee to start the day with,' i explained. and this is the killer line that i can't believe my brain came up with till this day:

Why draw the bloody lines yourself when you can get others to draw it for you?

this was the point when i positioned my pen at the bottom of the paper and asked my preceptee in a nice and friendly tone to pull the paper towards her. and lo and behold, there was one beautiful line drawn with some help from a fellow colleague. of course, there were several more lines to draw before there would be twelve boxes, but i think she got the point.

'By the way, can you pull the paper the other way so that i can get my lines drawn?'

'You're so full of shit at 7 in the morning,' she replied.


2) The patient has a thing that's leaking some stuff over there

a major problem with local nurses is the fact that they are bad at descriptions. i mean, things are not exactly very vivid when terms like 'there', 'something' and 'reddish-looking fluids' are used. perhaps this is why the doctors get so frustrated when someone who doesn't introduce themselves over the phone, makes a call describing a patient who has gone for 'an operation' and is complaining of 'pain' and thus 'can you do something about it?' (typical doctor answer: panadol, stat). most doctors and nurses spend time playing a verbal version of telephone charades, trying to guess what the other party is trying to tell them. when i first started out as a Staff Nurse, i was a major irritant, describing the wide varieties of fluids i see in the ward daily using common beverages as visuals (eg. it's a bit like pearl milk tea except that it doesn't have the pearls in it).

Fat Boy Slim (the fat preceptee with the girlfriend in the same ward as him) approached several doctors one day, asking for help with a patient under his care.

'Eh doctor (he talks like a thorough-bred mat), i've got a patient who's complaining of pain at this thing that he has over here,' with which he pointed at a very general area.

the general area in question? his left pectoral.

and Pangkeng and i don't call Fat Boy Slim 'Fat' unless his pectorals were the size of Manhattan (and i don't mean this in a good way). '?' was the only legible response i could think of that the doctor gave. i was writing my report at that point of time and was waiting for my junior nurse to return so that i could go for a smoke break. once again, the crankiness and a confetti of spring onions overwhelmed me and i just had to give my two cents worth about the 'pain' over 'there'.

'Eh,' i said in my best mat tone of voice, 'where are you referring to when you point there seahl? because 'there' covers a wide expanse of body parts. are you talking about the nipple? are you talking about the areola? or are you even talking about the axilla (a professional medical term that health-care industry people use to replace the layman's word 'armpit')?'

'There lah!' FBS pointed once more to his expansive pectoral. i couldn't help thinking how many dragons a tattoo artist could fit into that gargantuan portion of meat. 'Bang,' i said, as in ah bang, which is the malay term for 'brother' and not anything related to a group of people having sex, 'the doctors have no idea what you are referring to. you've got to be more precise lah. the nipple and axilla don't live in two seperate continents. they are only one hand's span of each other okay!' i followed-up with my own finger-pointing this time - the surfer's hang ten hand gesture (hand in a fist except the thumb and pinkie sticking out), one on the nipple and the other on the axilla.

to which the thorough-bred mat in Fat Boy Slim exclaimed: 'fuck seahl!'

in the end, Fat Boy Slim simply brought the doctor to the patient's bedside. he was talking about a Tenckhoff catheter (go google that up if you're not medically-trained).

(blogger's note: apologies for the medical blunder. and thanks to Dr Brachy for spotting the mistake. it's not a Tenckhoff catheter that Fat Boy was referring to, but rather a temporary dialysis catheter. on a side note, my maternal uncle just had a Tenckhoff inserted in the abdomen. it looks pretty cool actually.)

that's all the life lessons for today. come back tomorrow for more lessons. and when i say tomorrow, i will definitely post something tomorrow. the threat of the nipple jpg still looms.

---