Chapter 6: CRAZY? CRAZY LIKE A PSYCHIATRIC NURSE.

I've never understood the difficulty Psychiatric Nursing as a profession has had drawing recruits from the ranks of ‘normal’ nursing. I mean, I get why someone might not want to be a nurse in the first place, what with the faeces and the urine and the phlegm and the vomit and the people yelling at you all the time, but once you've made the decision and become comfortable with all that nice stuff why would you want to spend your whole career running around blue arsed fly style doing the same tasks over and over again.

I’m sure the glamour of standing next to the guy (or girl) mucking around inside some poor bastard's guts for 4 hours to save his (or her) life is very ‘ER’ the first 40 or 50 times but after a while it surely just gets to be a messy, stinky, boring chore. Maybe that’s why they’re always having steamy affairs on those hospital shows (or being blown up by lunatic ex-staff members – another reason not to be a normal nurse).

Now Psych Nursing on the other hand. Every day if different. There is no such thing as a ‘standard’ case of schizophrenia. You get to work in all sorts of different environments, with all sorts of different people and you will never get as much autonomy in any other area of Nursing (save for those Nurse Practitioner types who choose to work out in the middle of nowhere where they have to fly out Doctors at gunpoint every 2 months or so).

Sure, I have to put up with more death threats than the usual working man (usually after having to tell someone who really wants a smoke that they can’t have a smoke and also, no you can’t leave whenever you want and this law that no one ever told you about says so...) but so far 100% of the people who have threatened to kill me and dump my body in the bush somewhere have decided not to once they have been convinced that I do NOT work for the CIA/Satan/Our Alien Overlords and that the Hospital WILL discharge them once they have even a little bit more control over the thoughts passing through their temporarily untrustworthy minds.

The upside is that when the unpleasant stuff isn't happening, you do get a fair amount of time to think. On night shifts, you often get a lot. So it is useful to have something with which to fill that time (preferably something that allows you to maintain your concentration on the people you are being paid to look after). Mind you, once you start shooting down various thought related rabbit holes you can end up coming to some fairly interesting and somewhat unexpected conclusions.

Which is how I ended up where I have bicycle wise (just when you thought I would never get to the point).

NEXT: Where I ended up bicycle wise...