another reason why i will never be a doctor or nurse

i eavesdrop on the neighboring tables while having my cappuccino. don't blame me, i can't help it. a sharpened sense of hearing is one of caffeine's side effects, and i can't just turn it off. so while having my caffeine fix last friday, i found myself listening to an interesting conversation.

seated on the table next to me were 3 nursing students. apparently, one of them was a senior, and he was dishing out advice to the other 2, on how to get scholarships, getting through nursing school, surviving their hospital training, and landing a job in the states. the topic of conversation then shifted to their patients.

they had one patient who discovered he had bladder cancer because he was peeing blood. there was another patient, a young girl, who got burned all over due to an unfortunate kitchen accident. they talked about body fluids coming out, IV fluids coming in, pain medication, all the gory details.

'so how's mr. X in room Y?', asked one about another patient. 'oh... he just died', answered the other. they pause for a few seconds, 'so how's the coffee?'

it's curious how numb those 3 nurses have become. i can imagine them looking at their patients like grease monkeys trying to fix a busted car engine. true, desensitizing your own feelings should be a requirement in any medical career, since not doing so would leave you too paralyzed with sadness over the rising body count, too crippled w/ despair over the pain and suffering you witness firsthand. it's tough, but someone's got to do it. which is another reason i can never be a doctor or a nurse: you have to kill off a certain part of your humanity to function properly.

a case in point (though rather extreme): the senior nurse in the conversation talked about a fellow nurse he worked with. they had this patient, an old man, who was too frail to even put on his medical gown. but the nurse, who never paid attention to the old man in his struggle with his gown, just went on with her measurements of the IV drip rate. this came to the attention of their supervising nurse, who chastised the robot nurse. the robot nurse then shrugged and answered, 'sige sir', then went on her way.