Confessions of a School Nurse. Michael Alexander
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Название: Confessions of a School Nurse
Автор: Michael Alexander
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007586417
isbn:
I applied and after a phone interview, background and police check (I’d be living and working with children, after all) I was offered the job.
Walking into my new office on that first day with Mr Driscoll, the headmaster, made me forget about big city life almost immediately.
The southern wall of the school consisted of a window looking out onto towering peaks over 3000 metres, the highest already capped with snow, despite only being late August. I felt a pang of guilt thinking the view was even better than what I was used to back in New Zealand.
Yes. I knew I’d made the right decision for me and my budding family. I felt this could be home.
‘You’re free to do as you see fit,’ Mr Driscoll said as he showed us around the clinic. My colleagues in crime, Justine and Michaela, glanced at me in surprise. None of us had ever worked in a boarding school before; we had all come from the frontline of the nursing profession, used to being surrounded by large teams. We had taken the leap from the Accident and Emergency to an elite boarding school. We had a clean slate.
Justine was from Alaska. She had spent the last ten years in emergency medicine and had come over with her husband who had a job as a maths teacher at the school.
Michaela was from Minneapolis and specialised in paediatric emergency medicine. She had also come with her husband; they had always wanted to live in Europe.
‘With your combined experience, I trust you’ll do a great job,’ Mr Driscoll added. And with that, he left us to it. The school was to be our playground.
On our first day at work, we found out that we were alone; alone and in charge of 400 students, some of the world’s most privileged children. There was no on-site doctor lurking in the background who we could turn to for help; no alarm button to press when things turned sour; no oxygen, no intravenous access, none of the equipment that I’d gotten used to having on hand, ready for instant use.
The 400 children came from over fifty nationalities, and while the majority spoke English to a high standard at least ten per cent knew little or none of the language. Other than English, the next most common tongue was Russian.
The other nurses and I were to be responsible for keeping the children healthy, taking care of them when they were ill or hurt, helping them to get along with each other, counselling them through life’s hurdles, and arming them with the knowledge that comes from being an ‘old woman’ or ‘old man’ who has made it this far in life without too many major screw-ups (the fact that we’re not even grey doesn’t seem to matter to the kids).
I was looking forward to the challenge. No longer would I have to deal with shootings, stabbings, heart attacks, strokes, violent drunks or demented, incontinent or suicidal patients. Instead, I was going to be looking after fit, young, healthy teenagers. How hard could that be?
The parents had spent a fortune to send their kids here: 100,000 euros per child per year. I assumed they would be hardworking, motivated, intelligent, considerate, good-natured, balanced individuals …
However, as you’ll discover over the course of this book, I’m not always great with assumptions.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Marcus cried, whipping up his tracksuit bottoms to hide himself from the family crowd gathered outside.
I bundled Marcus out the office, into the car and off to the local doctor’s office. Thankfully, Dr Fritz’s surgery is in the centre of the village, only a five-minute drive away.
Proximity and willingness alone made Dr Fritz the unofficial school doctor. In addition to running a full-time GP practice, he was also our first port of call if there was an issue the nursing staff felt needed a doctor’s opinion, and we would make an appointment at his office and send the child along. Even on his time off, it was not uncommon for him to see our students if the matter was urgent. Dr Fritz was also there if a student needed specialist help, as he knew who the closest and best experts were, and referrals were made through him.
Like all born and bred mountain men, Dr Fritz is a no-nonsense man. He’s also one of the hardest working GPs I’ve ever met. He is always there during the day or available in the middle of the night, no matter what, and it wasn’t unusual for him to put in an eighty-hour week.
He even has the ‘unique quirks’ that often come not only with living in an isolated mountain village, but being the only GP for a whole community.
He was happy to see Marcus straight away. Pain in the testicles can be very serious. Torsion (a twisted spermatic cord) is a surgical emergency. Within minutes, the doctor had Marcus lying on the examination table.
He began his assessment as all doctors do, by examining the whole person and not just the affected part, and gradually worked his way to Marcus’s testicles. I had wondered if he was going to glove-up as he doesn’t always, and in this case didn’t, although he was completely professional in his exam. At one point Marcus raised an eyebrow and gave me a worried look, but he kept quiet. It isn’t wise to question any man who has your nuts resting in the palm of their bare hands.
Once the examination was over, Dr Fritz arranged for an ultrasound scan to take place as soon as possible.
‘I do not think it is a torsion,’ he explained, ‘but we need to be sure.’ We were standing by the reception desk, as he turned the pages of his diary. He licked the index finger of his right hand to turn another page … the same hand he’d just used to feel Marcus’s testicles.
I glanced at Marcus to see if he had noticed, and saw him staring at the doctor’s hand, his mouth hanging open. He leant towards me and whispered in an appalled tone, ‘He just tasted my balls.’
Dr Fritz does wear gloves when strictly necessary, has always been proper and he did wash his hands, but not before the ultrasound had been arranged. Where other doctors usually wear gloves when examining warts, fungusy toes, and the like, Dr Fritz doesn’t. I don’t agree with Dr Fritz sometimes, but he is completely trustworthy if a little unprofessional – you wouldn’t get away with it in most places, and in a way, that shows just how unique this little community is.
This was the first of many peculiarities I would eventually come across while working with the doctor.
As for Marcus, the ultrasound showed that he had a hydrocele, or a little cyst full of fluid, attached to his left testicle, that is absolutely harmless. Marcus calmed down a great deal once he realised his balls weren’t going to drop off, and the pain settled with some ibuprofen.
As first weeks go, this was pretty ridiculous … but, as I was to find out, this was just the beginning.
I have a confession to make: before seeing the school vacancy, I had never planned on working with children. But I figured it wouldn’t be too hard. I’d learned some of the general rules during my years in the emergency room; developed СКАЧАТЬ