Friday, June 17, 2011

Trained monkey


So today is the last day of having to put up with my friend the Moronic Nursing Student.  I turned up this morning and had to grit my teeth so hard that they crumbled like chalk.  Here's a rough transcription of the first 30 seconds, prompted by me throwing a piece of paper at a bin and having it land right on the rim:

Moron
You've obviously never played basketball.  I used to play basketball with my mates, half of them were in the state team, they were just psycho.  How'd your plumbing problems go yesterday?  I reckon a trained monkey could be a plumber.  It's not hard.  I don't know why they get paid so much.  It's like electricians.  I reckon a trained monkey could be an electrician.  I don't know why they get paid so much.  So tell me, why do you reckon that person was there in the hall?
PTR
The special sitting on the chair? Presumably the patient is bonkers or violent or a wanderer.

Moron
See, the thing is, with age-related cognitive decline, people forget they can't walk, so they're a falls risk.  Some people fall over really easily, they get up and boom, they fall down.  We had one guy who fell down more than six thousand times in one month, he was full on.  So you've got to have someone sitting there watching them to make sure they don't try to walk.

PTR
My goodness, I never suspected.

Moron
It's pretty boring having to watch them, I reckon a trained monkey could do it.

He has also lectured me extensively on painkillers, napalm, styrofoam, back pain, how to put in cannulas, his last bout of diarhoea, his mobile phone plan, the legality of restraining patients, what the effective dose of anti-epileptic medication is, and so on and so on and so on. And so on.

I got some small measure of retribution just now when he slipped up and admitted to never having heard of conversion disorder.  So I expressed great astonishment that such information was not in the nursing curriculum and wondered why he had never come across this in his background reading, then brutally patronized him him for a few minutes whilst desperately trying to remember the few scanty shreds of knowledge that I could dredge up from second year.

Revenge is a dish best served hot!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about my episodes of diarhoea/diarrhea? Could they be explained by conversion disorder, doctor?

Anonymous said...

Hardsports conversion to watersports?

PTR said...

Sounds like you're making some kind of in-joke that I'm not in on. Sorry.