Duck or Get Squashed

If you think working in our unit is like going to a fancy dress ball with all this tiny benignly naughty nurses with cute skintight knit hoses – doesn’t mean that tights is still fashionable after 1989 or knit hoses are still pre-requisite to the job, but that is still the stereotypical image of a nurse by a stereotypical bloke ain’t it? Think again. Our ICU is like an Amazonian world where alpha females constantly mud-wrestle to oust another alpha female in ruling a pack of Amazonian women.

Imagine Eve Nazi sister you never see smile when she comes to work. She always got the churned up look every time she works with a new overseas nurse. She doesn’t allow them to touch the bedside computer believing the whole network will crash because of their technological ineptitude. She would make you believe that women Nazi soldiers are worse than men in the treatment of war prisoners during the holocaust.

Then there’s the overly patronizing sister Rebecca who likes to think she is a reincarnation of a Sylvia Pankhurst – type character from the industrial age. She is into Buddhism, Rastafarianism, communism or council bolshevism, holistic medicine and all the isms and alternative crap that you can think of. She is into a lot of them, that she admits she gets confused with her political agenda. She gets premenstrual all the time. Very unstable. At times she is laidback, other times she is a slave driver obsessed with work output and productivity. Gilda said, “she is sex deprived by her chav-scum toy boy.”

The same with her twin Trotskyite Sister Petra who has interesting views on why she hates Lenin and why she thinks the former Soviet Union was actually a capitalist state as it was run by party bureaucrats and all that, but is also an intellectual snob who would quash creative input from the ICU “collective” in say, what kind of food to bring for the unit barbecue. “Nuts”, I’d say.

Thank God, lesbian sister Stella left. I actually thought she was a man, until I saw her wearing a skimpy PVC skirt when we went to watch a local production of “The Rocky Horror Show”. It was so hilarious when a newly hired overseas nurse confessed of getting her sex advice from her before she went home to get married in India. Imagine what happens when a young straight boy had sex education from a stroppy old queer. Stella then found a better paying job with better looking uniform as infection control adviser in another hospital. Apparently, she disliked the very generic non-gender-specific look of our hospital scrub suits. Her new job suited her very anal personality.

What we put up with every fucking day. These are women in huge bondage boots who could easily bundle you in the trunk of their cars or run over. Duck or get squashed, tell me about it. Not that a few of us male staff cared as most of the aggression are directed to their own amazonkind. Considering the profession’s military past – picture stiff heavily starched uniforms and navy shoulder pads.

Pic of The Sisters - Canada's Military Heritage

See any bloke there?

I can understand. My girlfriend left three years ago disgusted to what she called too much “bitching” in the unit. We certainly need more male staff here.