…and a few of my favorite memes to soften the blow.
I’m fully expecting some kind of nurse/equine crossover perspective on the coronavirus and resulting end of the world. I know you have it all up there in your head. Just let it out.
Brit Martin, A Dear Friend, Logistical Coordinator of WordPress and Blogging
I worked as an ER nurse at a Level II Trauma Center for like, 179 years (modest estimate considering ER nurse years are at least two times dog years, and that’s without calculating in the coefficients of factors such as night shift, weekends, full moons, holidays, and time at home spent naked and sobbing on the bathroom floor until you can stand long enough to autoclave yourself until you run out of hot water. By the way: the full moon syndrome is a real thing, y’all. Stable people turn into loose cannons and unstable people’s cheese slides off their cracker). No, we don’t even notice when you change into a gown. We’ve already seen at least 23 asses before lunch. Chances are, we’ve already told a dude to put his pecker back in his pants because we haven’t even taken his blood pressure yet for triage and left the “you might not be eating antibiotics like tic-tacs if you weren’t so eager to share it with everybody to begin with” part out. Yes, we had a trophy box (until our charge nurse found out, that is. Take it away all you want but those items and their stories will live on in our hearts forever). Yes, we probably laughed at you behind your back if you did something that warranted being laughed at that landed you in the ER. I can assure you that some things that seem like a good idea on a Saturday night with a glass of wine and mood lighting will change your tune if you suddenly put them on a stretcher under fluorescent lights and the discerning eyes of at least 5 medical professionals. Context becomes *everything*.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a thousand times, you’re probably a meteorologist.
-unknown
Same goes for coming to the ER with a piece of PVC stuck on your knob. Do it once, we’ll let you walk out with your dignity (but not the PVC. That shit’s going in the trophy box). Everybody makes mistakes. Do it twice, I can’t exactly write, “If you must continue to do this: USE A LONGER PIECE” in the patient education section of my notes. While I’m at it, I couldn’t ever write, “If you’re going to put something in your butt, make sure someone who loves you very, very much has a solid hold on the other end of it”, either. That’s good advice. You’re Welcome.
No, you can’t get rabies from seeing a bat on TV. And please, for the love of everything you hold sacred, please tell everyone you know that opossums are NOT giant rodents, they CANNOT carry rabies as their body temperature is too low, and they are NOT disgusting animals. They are very fastidious critters and are North America’s ONLY marsupial and eat over 5000 ticks in a single season PER OPOSSUM (probably because ticks are the only living things they can chase down and overpower). Instead of using them as speed bumps, swerve and scream, “Thanks for culling the Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever herd, guys! Keep up the good work!” then honk for safety and KEEP DRIVING. They really are lovely creatures. One fell out of a tree in our back yard during an ice storm last year and we took him in and cared for him until he was all better then for an extra month or two for good measure (it’s really hard when your babies grow up and move out. Locked doors help ease the transition until you’re ready. Don’t judge.). His name was Isaac Newton (courtesy of Sandy Siegrist, a human, equine, and canine cranio-sacral therapist and bodyworker with at least as much influence on any given state of affairs as the full moon but in an opposite, etherial, and magical kind of way; if she’s not one of the most enchanting, wise souls you’ve ever encountered then you’re not paying attention). Anyway, Sandy named him Isaac Newton (because of his lesson on gravity) and he was essentially like living with an adorable, snuggly, digital, stop-motion cat-pig that loved red grapes more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life:
Speaking of Sir Isaac Newton, he’s a perfect segway to the Equestrian portion of this story. He was the physicist and mathematician credited with the laws of motion. He was born in England in the early 1640’s to a farmer, Isaac, and his wife, Hannah. His dad died three months before he was born, then his mother left him with her mother so she could run off with a loaded minister and have three of his babies before he also kicked the bucket (not pointing any fingers or anything, but Hannah’s husbands die. Fact.). So Isaac is now 12 years old and living in an apothecary while studying chemistry. His mom rolls back in town with Barnabas Smith’s kids in tow, pulls Isaac out of school, and makes him tend the fields. Insert, “I know mommy’s been MIA for a while now, Isaac, but Im back now and that’s what matters. You’re officially the man of the house. Here’s a team of mules and a shovel. Baby needs new shoes.” here. As it turned out, he sucked at it. Found it monotonous. Which is probably one of the few things I have in common with Sir Isaac Newton. His uncle pulled some strings and got him enrolled at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1661. Incidentally, in 1665, the bubonic plague was ravaging Europe and forced Cambridge to close for two years. Two YEARS. Slow clap for COVID19 that we are eyeballs deep in like, RIGHT NOW. Moving on…
So Mr. Newton and I both find monotonous things to be tediously monotonous. Enter the second half of the background story. As previously established, ER nursing has a shelf-life. One that I exceeded way before I walked out the doors for the last time. It was my identity. It was my camaraderie. Every day was going into an unknown situation where I saw families on the absolute worst day of their lives every day of mine. My innocence was lost in a bombardment of bells and alarms and lights and screams doing a job that if I fucked up, the consequences were astronomically higher than if I took someone the wrong order of food or put the wrong item in a box to be shipped. My quarter ran out. That’s roughly the same time when the equestrian facility my partner taught for axed their horseback riding lesson program. Fast forward to both of us living in Madison County, NC on a roughly 140 acre tract of land with anywhere between 8 and 18 horses in our back yard, boarders coming and boarders going, families, teenagers, and training clients, a hodgepodge of disciplines, and a wide range of students swarming the hive at all hours. The only bathroom is inside our house, which is conveniently located smack-dab between the old barn and horse paddocks and the arena. The lesson program we set out to run quickly revealed itself to be way down the list, obscured in the fine print of masses and masses, of roles outlined in our job description. Worthy of note: I don’t teach. I have no desire to teach. Me teaching something I could do half asleep post-lobotomy suddenly becomes physically impossible and the finished product comes across like I tried to forge the Mona Lisa with my left hand and some Crayolas. Having any audience whatsoever turns me into a poo-flinging monkey. Furthermore, I am inept at training animals. My psychiatrist would say that’s because I compulsively personify literally everything, but whatever. I grew up around horses and that is the extent of what I am capable of accomplishing with them: coexisting. I am not gifted. How people understand them and integrate themselves into a herd to an extent that they can pull one out and speak their language is beyond me. I’m awkward amongst my *own* species; horse communication isn’t even written with letters in my alphabet, much less words in my language. If I hadn’t witnessed with my own eyes the relationship other people can develop with these beasts, I’d honestly think horsemanship was just another Pinterest lie fueled by books and movies that rages on in the hearts of people that believe in unicorns.
The isolation alone was enough to facilitate a stable insanity of sorts. Every morning I’d open my eyes, walk to the window, and scream:
Super Soakers, high powered nerf guns, air horns, and my megaphone became the new tools of my trade. If I was feeling particularly vindictive, I’d fly a kite. Paddock to paddock I’d sing, “Ah, ha, ha, ha, staying’ alive, staying’ alive / Ah, ha, ha, ha, staying’ alive / Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me / somebody help me, yeah “.
It rained. It snowed. It rained and snowed. The wind blew. The ground became a mud like I’ve never known. Thick, knee deep quicksand-like substance the consistency of brownie batter with horse poop and hoof sized pockets of a greenish glazed substance with a stench that lingered even in 40 mph winds. I developed a way of navigating it that is a modified version of the rest-step developed to help mountaineers ascend peaks: step, sink, lift opposite heel ever so slowly until I heard a sound I can only liken to the earth giving birth to a mud baby, pull leg out at a 45 degree angle, step, sink, repeat.
Sometimes I’d fall down. Sometimes I’d begin flailing about trying to get up like a mouse on a sticky trap, and sometimes I’d just lay there and think, “Now’s a good a time as any to die. I’ve heard freezing to death isn’t the worst way to go…” which brings me to the nurse/equestrian crossover perspective on the Coronavirus. They both feel exactly like this:
According to USA Today Travel Tips: in absolute numbers, driving is more dangerous, with more than 5 million accidents compared to 20 accidents in flying. A more direct comparison per 100 million miles pits driving’s 1.27 fatalities and 80 injuries against flying’s lack of deaths and almost no injuries, which again shows air travel to be safer. I interpret that to mean that you’re far more likely to get injured or killed in a car than you are on a plane. However, amount of time the average person spends engaging in each mode of travel, or the absolute number of people on the ground vs. the absolute number of people in the air at any given moment isn’t factored in to those statistics. Neither is the severity of consequence if something goes awry. I’d be more comfortable with a ratio, USA Today. The way I see it, the likelihood of sustaining an injury from being in a car crash is so much greater because the “injury” of being in an airplane crash is also known as a “fatality”. Similarly, ER nursing at a Level II Trauma Center vs. wrangling horses in Madison County in mud so deep you can’t run = risks of driving vs. flying: The former in each scenario is infinitely more likely to cause multiple minor injuries. The latter: if *anything at all* goes wrong, you’re definitely going to die. Which, now that I think about it, has not much at all to do with COVID19 and everything to do with the Bee Gees.
