Confessions of a Male Nurse

‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Cherie asked me.

Under pressure my mind remained a blank.

‘The jelly – the lubricant – you forgot to put some on your finger,’ she said, in a slightly exasperated tone of voice.

‘Oh, yeah right, sorry,’ I replied, as I squeezed the tube of jelly a little too hard. So hard that I managed to lather up not just my finger but both of my hands as well. Cherie rolled her eyes but kept silent.

I hadn’t even begun to insert the suppository because with my rubber gloves soaking in lubricant I was struggling to hold up her cheek with one hand and the suppository in the other. The cheek kept slipping down and covering the target. I looked up to see an amused (and slightly bemused) looking Cherie.

‘Let me help,’ Cherie said as she grabbed hold of Mrs Stewart’s cheek and held it up.

‘Here we go, Mrs Stewart,’ I said as I went for gold.

I heard Cherie stifle a gasp. I suddenly felt nauseous.

With far too much lubricant on my hands, the suppository had missed and gone in the wrong hole. At least Mrs Stewart didn’t seem to notice anything because she was still numb from the remains of the epidural.

‘I’ve never seen that happen before,’ remarked Cherie.

I looked up into her face and gave her a ‘What now?’ sort of look.

She made a hooking gesture with her finger.

‘You must be kidding,’ I mouthed back at her. There was no way I was going searching in ‘there’ – it even crossed my mind that ‘searching’ in ‘there’ could be a form of abuse. My only hope was that it hadn’t gone too far. One thing I was sure of was that Voltaren was pretty rough on the stomach, and I began to worry what it could do if left in such a sensitive place.

I needed to move fast because this felt wrong. I looked up at Cherie again and shook my head. There were some things a man should not do and this was one of them. But Cherie motioned for me to hurry up and get on with it.

‘You’re a nurse now,’ Cherie whispered quietly, as if this meant I had an open licence to dig around in women’s private parts.

Eventually, I took a deep breath and with a quick flick of my index finger I managed to scoop out the offending suppository. Cherie gave me a ‘thumbs up’. I quickly popped the thing in the right spot, while Cherie rolled Mrs Stewart back on to her back.

‘All done, Mrs Stewart,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’

Mrs Stewart took a moment to answer. She gave me a strange look.

‘Fine,’ she said eventually.

I left the room very quickly, without saying another word.

‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ I asked Cherie back in the nurses’ office. ‘I felt like a total pervert,’ I added.

Cherie didn’t answer, because she was bent double laughing – although she eventually recovered long enough to inform the whole ward.

Sharon’s law (#u99288368-c2dc-581b-8db8-b64de8fcf600)

A nurse is a nurse first, and a woman (or in my case, a man) second. At least, that was the thinking of my mentor, Cherie. One of Cherie’s favourite sayings was, ‘If a woman has to go down there, then so do you.’ Maybe that was why she made me go after that suppository. In Cherie’s world of nursing, there was no gender, just doing the job and doing it well. My problem was I never expected to be doing this particular job, in this particular area of nursing.

I had applied to work at the hospital as a general nurse on the new graduate programme. I expected to be offered a ‘normal’ nursing job in a surgical or medical ward. But I couldn’t turn down the offer of a full-time job. They didn’t even interview me for the position. Maybe the personnel manager was too embarrassed to admit that she had made a mistake. Maybe this was the reason no one seemed to like me, especially Sharon.

‘Stop daydreaming: pull your finger out your arse and do some work.’

The calm way in which Sharon said this left me speechless.

‘And close your mouth, you look stupid.’

Sharon seemed satisfied that she had made me look the fool and moved on down the corridor in search of her next victim. Only four weeks into my nursing career and I was learning to avoid my charge nurse at all costs. I looked over at Cherie.

‘I have to tell you something you won’t like’ – Cherie was never afraid to speak her mind – ‘Sharon doesn’t like you . . . a lot.’

With my self-esteem at an all-time low, I began to go about my rounds.

I knew that I knew nothing. It was a good thing really, as too much confidence can be harmful.

It won’t come as a surprise that I struggled with some parts of the job already. Things were unfamiliar, and it was usually vitally important that I got them right. The latest problem in front of me was called erythromycin. It’s an antibiotic, and in this case it needed to be injected straight into a vein.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Sharon asked me, as she entered the treatment room and saw me standing with a syringe full of intravenous antibiotic.

‘I’m waiting for Cherie,’ I replied cautiously.

Hospital policy stated that all intravenous medicines needed to be checked by a second person, but I felt a bit useless standing there doing nothing because mine had already been checked.

‘Let’s have a look. I’ll check them for you.’ Sharon began to look at the drug chart.

‘It’s already been checked,’ I replied. ‘I’m just waiting for Cherie, because she has to watch me administer it.’ Again this was hospital policy.

Sharon rolled her eyes and quietly cursed. I’d said the wrong thing.

There was an awkward silence; a silence which I hoped would last, because I knew when Sharon spoke it wouldn’t be to say how conscientious I was.

Sharon finally broke it with a calm voice, though I could sense the anger building:

‘Are you a registered nurse?’

I wasn’t sure whether to answer. Was it a rhetorical question? I knew there was more to come, so I just nodded my head.

‘Well, start acting like one,’ she added, her voice rising up an octave. ‘You can’t have someone holding your hand all the time. Take some initiative.’

I left the treatment room in a hurry and approached my patient.

Here I was standing at the patient’s bedside, with a syringe full of antibiotic that I’d never given before. Policy stated that I needed three months’ supervision before I could give these medicines on my own, and I was just nearing the end of my first month.

My mind was chaos turning over silly thoughts, crazy thoughts, even suspicious thoughts. Was Sharon trying to set me up to fail? What if something went wrong? I wasn’t even aware of all that could go wrong. If something did happen, no one would back me. Sharon would deny everything. What could I do? I knew what I should do . . . but I couldn’t risk facing the wrath of Sharon.

I slowly opened the intravenous valve and began to insert the syringe. In my nervousness I fumbled the syringe and it fell on to the bed. Was it still okay to use? I didn’t know, but Sharon would kill me if she saw me drawing up another antibiotic. I inserted the syringe and gave the antibiotic, because it was easier to do this than create a scene. I watched the patient’s chest to monitor her breathing. I felt her pulse . . . did it skip a beat? No, I was imagining things.

I waited anxiously those first few minutes, silently praying that nothing went wrong. Thank goodness my patient didn’t know how nervous I was, but even more importantly, thank goodness she didn’t have a clue that I wasn’t supposed to be doing this yet, even if my charge nurse had ordered me to. After five minutes, I figured that if anything was going to happen, it already would have. The one thing that even new nurses know is that with intravenous medicine when something goes wrong, it tends to happen pretty instantaneously.

I’d got away with it, this time, but would I always be so fortunate? One month in and life as a male nurse was already proving to be a minefield.