I work night shift. That means from 7pm to 7am I am at work. That also means that when we have a rough shift and want to decompress with a beer after work, we are drinking at 7:30am. And yes, we go to our breakfast restaurants in our scrubs and have no shame in ordering a pitcher (or several depending on the shift and the size of our group) of beer before 8am. Our restaurant of choice on Monday's tends to cater to the older local population and to the young tourist families. I LOVE seeing their faces when they see us in scrubs drinking at 8am. It is kind of amazing that people don't understand night shift. We can't drink at 8pm with the rest of you because we are busy keeping people alive. And when we drink at 8am, we are usually following that up by going home and going to bed.
EVERY time we are at breakfast though, at least one person asks our server if we are on our way in to work. Some days, people are brave enough to ask us directly. I usually try to refrain from my typical sarcastic remark (there is only 1 hospital in town and I don't want to have to talk to HR or administration because I answered a stupid question with sarcasm and scared/pissed off a board member or something). It's funny and sad just how ridiculous people can be. I really blame bad TV shows for depicting nurses as desperate, doctor hunting, drug stealing, cheating alcoholics that worry more about our social lives and which physician we are going to sleep with next than actually taking care of our patients. (Side note: I have been a nurse for 8 years and have worked at 5 hospitals and have yet to meet a doctor that I want to sleep with and have never even considered stealing a med from a patient.)
But let me tell you how much fun we have after work. People that work in medicine tend to have a twisted sense of humor. Meredith Gray (Gray's anatomy) says "I'm dark and twisty." Yeah, I think I am too. I think we need to be just to get past some of the stuff we see. If I can't laugh about the some of this stuff, then I think I would totally breakdown. The people at breakfast almost always make us laugh.
One morning, as we are giggling about something, this older couple sits down next to us. She says to him "I didn't know they served iced tea in those pitchers". Granted, I guess Yuengling could be mistaken for tea, but the only ice to be found was on the outside of our frosty mugs. Of course that just made us giggle more.
Another time, we were chatting and I was glancing at the morning news shows (they are always on mute, so I only guess what they are actually saying) and this photo of a girl pops up. She honestly looks like she is auditioning for Playboy. Then the feed displays the story and it is about some high school girl that is suing because the yearbook committee (made entirely of other students) vetoed that photo for the yearbook. If you've ever watched the morning shows (like Today, or GMA) you know that they show the same promos for 30-45 min before the actual show. So for the next half hour I kept seeing this photo flash up on my screen. Finally, in the middle of a sentence, I yelled out "hooker". No idea why that came out like that, but it did. Right at that moment, a 70+ y/o guy and his 50+y/o significant other sat at the booth next to us. He looks over, smirks and says "tell me more about those hookers". Needless to say, the wife/gf/so didn't look so happy with us. I won't embarrass my friend by finishing the story. Maybe if she reads this one, she can give her permission...
Usually, by the end of the meal, someone has said something that has us all laughing so hard we are crying. That becomes the quote of the day, when I remember it later... Some of my favorites "and then I told them to show me the real thing," "and you didn't buy him a prosthetic one?" "you can't hold me down, I rebel," "dude, you're not worth the dent," and pretty much anything our server buddy JB says.
I don't know if I should, but I think I'll tell you about when we scared the poor bar back... I can't remember exactly how the little joke goes, but it's something like: I'm a nurse, I've seen more dick that a prostitute and I don't make as much money. We can be pretty blue with our jokes. If you didn't know, the foam on the top of a beer is called the head. Some people know how to fill a pitcher so that there isn't much head and some people just can't seem to get it right. This young guy brought out our pitcher and there was way to much foam. So of course we start in on the "big head" jokes. I think 4 girls asking him about head was just too much for him to take. He not only ran away from our table, he changed his shirt so as to not be recognized by us...
So here's to beer and eggs, laughing with friends, pitchers of tea and scarring young guys...
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