\nursing humor

Everyone loves a good joke, right? I know I do.

Nurses love a good joke, too. But beware: nursing humor is like no other, and it’s not something they normally share with outsiders. I found this out the night I spent in the Trauma Center, after being run over and almost killed by TJ while crossing Santa Monica Boulevard. Even though I was unconscious, somehow I could still hear every word they said.

Real nursing jokes are nothing like:

What’s the difference between Mother Teresa and a nurse? Mother Teresa only has to serve one God.

As clever as that sounds, it’s just not real nursing humor. Real nursing jokes are more along the lines of:

Woman diagnosed with colon cancer asks nurse what her best advice is. Nurse tells her, “Well, if you like anal sex, I suggest you get your fill now before your asshole rots off.”

Or

Man walks into the ER holding his head, saying “Nurse, I’ve got a terrible headache.” Nurse says, “A headache is the least of your problems; your skull is split wide open and your brains are herniating all over the place.”

Or

Woman comes into the ER clenching her butt cheeks and doing everything she can not to shit herself. When she gets up on the table, she tells the nurse she thinks she must have eaten something that didn’t agree with her. She has really bad diarrhea, and her butthole burns. Nurse takes one look at her anus and tells her, “It’s not something you ate, dear, it’s HPV. Not much we can do now except try and curtail the stench.”

If you think that’s bad, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Next thing I knew, I was in the hospital. The Trauma Center, to be exact.

The trauma center? Wow. I must have hit my head harder than I thought.

The trauma center is the Super Bowl of head injuries. It’s where all the action is, and it’s no laughing matter. This is serious stuff. Still, the injured parties sometimes think it’s some kind of joke. Half the time they’re either drunk or hopped up on goofballs. Maybe that has something to do with their state of mind. Or maybe, it’s just because half their brains are usually spilling out all over the place.

I thought I knew a thing or two about brain damage and head injuries. Funny how it is when you think you know a thing or two about a thing or two, and then you come across someone who really does, suddenly you realize you know nothing at all.

That night I spent in the trauma center was like a night spent in a house of horrors. Oh, the humanity.

Apparently, stories of brain injuries in the trauma center abound. Like smushing brains back into people’s skulls. While a few staples may do wonders for someone’s outward appearance, it hardly brings them back to life. I heard one nurse talking about the time she was in the elevator when a patch job blew. Herniated brains began oozing everywhere. Rarely does anyone survive such a thing, but there are those few times a person may actually live if there is still room enough in the skull when the brain begins swelling back up.

This one time, so the story goes, they even set to drilling bore holes with a Sears Black and Decker. Another time, they had to remove the whole skull cap. If the brain doesn’t have room to swell up, it swells down, resulting in certain death.

When it comes to lunch time in the trauma center, all bets are off. It seems nurses are big fans of tacos, especially brain tacos. Tacos de Sesos, as they’re known in their native land, are about as disgusting as it gets, and trauma nurses gobble them up like so many bad jokes. The real question is, what kind of brains are they? If the trauma nurses know, they’re simply not telling.

They won’t talk much about what stuff they find in the ER, either. You see, patients in the trauma center were never expecting to wind up there. It’s that whole thing about making sure you’re wearing clean underwear before you leave home; but clean underwear is the least of these people’s problems now.

You simply wouldn’t believe some of the things trauma nurses find taped to people’s bodies, or inside their coochies: pocket knives, wads of bills, even crack pipes. And the socks. Okay, so here’s one of the cardinal rules of the trauma center: never remove a patient’s socks, not under any circumstances. Why? Because more times than not you’re going to find bugs, worms, sometimes whole toes even come off.

These are just a few of the stories I heard that night in the trauma center. It’s amazing the things people say when they think you can’t hear. These nurses were nothing more than a bunch of crazed lunatics. The truly amazing part was, they were just getting warmed up.

Have you heard the one about the prisoner who came into the trauma center with a glass tube inserted into his urethra? He was in so much pain, he bit half his tongue off.

Did you hear the one about the prisoner who cut his finger off just so he could get a free trip to the hospital? He was looking to steal some painkillers; and anyway, he knew they would sew it back on.

This went on all night.

Apparently, prisoners are frequent guests to the ER. Seems prisoners will do anything to get a few days off from jail. Not because they’re afraid they’ll get murdered or even worse, man-raped, but just out of sheer boredom. That, and trying to steal narcotics.

Ever hear the one about the prisoner who got his lips cut off because he was supposedly a snitch? The doctors accidentally sewed them back onto his butt, and now he’s kissing his own ass.