Ch-ch-ch-changes (couldn't resist)

So, I was up at the school Friday picking up my syllabus, and I decided to wander the halls and find my classrooms. Our school is rather urban, and the nursing classrooms are located in another world of sorts--away from the halls filled with kids that look and act like highschoolers.

The third floor (where nursing stuff happens) is dominated by white, late-twenties/early-thirties women in sweat pants and jeans. Yet, just one flight of stairs down, there is an atmosphere of unrest and boredom. There, a mish-mash of colored complexions and street wear melts together as the floor actually bounces when students walk/run/skulk to class. No one looks very happy down there--more like they have been forced there to study things like fashion design (which I am not knocking--it is just strange that there are so many wanna-be-fashion-designers when very few people seem to "make it" in that business). Now, I am making generalizations here, but you get the picture.

As I walked the nursing halls, I actually looked at some of the students hanging out and was struck by this thought: wouldn't the diploma program my mom was enrolled in, circa 1960's, freak over the plethora of nose/lip/belly-button rings, tattoo's and wierd hair-dye jobs nursing students sport today? And the chain-smoking---wow.

Mom and I were talking on the phone about this after I left the school (and yes, I found my classes-shew). Her nursing school uniform consisted of a smock like dress, white hose, and lace-up nursing shoes. She wore a cap all the time (which got ripped off her head by bedside curtains more than once--along with her cool 60's hairpiece) and she sometimes wore a white-blazer-coat-type-thing.

If you ask my mom about her days in nursing school, you probably won't get a very positive response--basically, nursing school back then sounds like hell on earth, people. Mom actually went to her graduation in a wheel chair--she got mono her last section and was deathly ill--partly due to the stress and not being able to recouperate properly.

I recently asked her about school, anyway...specifically about her mental health rotation. (Now I wonder if that was a mistake--do I need any more horror stories at this point in my career?)

For mental health, the nursing sttudents "back then" were required to live at an "institution" during the week and work there day and night to complete clinical requirements. The hospital she was at had 2000 residents--from the criminally insane to the bulemic--they all lived there in different areas of teh building.

Mom learned to knit at this point in her life, and would sit up during the night-shift making my dad (her boyfriend at the time) a warm sweater with sleeves that ended up hanging down to his knees. She talks about hearing "things" at night and feeling like there was something very "demonic" about the place. For a 19 year old, it was very hard for her to understand how to differentiate between mental illness and evil in such a place.

Case in point: One of mom's assignments--we will call him Charlie--was a boy of 11. He was like any other kid on the outside, and mom was to just talk to him, find out what he liked to do, and of course, particpate in some "therapeutic communication" with him. She was supposed to do her actual assessment before reading his chart, and her instructor kept tabs on how the interview was going.

Charlie sat at a table across from my mom and they played some table games while talking. Mom didn't know why he kept dropping things and going under the table to pick them up--but she figured maybe he was trying to look up her skirt, so she tried to distract him. Then, at some point, the little kid got on the floor and started playing with mom's shoelaces. That was when the instructor happened to look in--and seeing what was happening, told mom to come with her immediately. The instructor figured it was time my mom read Charlie's chart.

You see, Charlie was "criminally insane" as evidenced by his upbringing--that of a prostitute's son who was in a gang as a small child. He had already seen all kinds of horrors in his short life--many of which mom won't elaborate on. Charlie, at the age of nine, had raped and then strangled a little girl--and he had done it with the girl's shoelaces.

Mom's class was the last class of students to work at this hospital due to some different disturbing things that happened that semester--one being the death of 5 students in a car accident over a weekend break--a car accident my mother was supposed to be in. But she had missed her ride that night and had taken the bus instead.

Hm, is it a wonder my mom has tried to dissuade me from nursing?? Thank God things have changed...