Grammar Police

03/25/10 - Thursday NIght

My J-O-B has me feeling writing deprived.  There just aren’t enough hours in the day.  Clutch the pearls!!  Did I really just write down that old worn out cliché’?  I want to write but I have brain drain from working and taking online courses in pharmacology.  It’s awful, just awful.

I want to go into poet labor and birth a poem, but there are no signs of labor, not even a Braxton-Hicks contraction.  

My preceptor, bless her heart, uses the worst grammar imaginable.  It takes all my self-discipline and at least one extra Tranzene a day to keep myself from turning into the grammar police.  Listening to her makes my brain hurt. If I were issuing citations for double negatives alone, I would use up a whole book of tickets before lunch.  

Speaking of lunch, she takes at least an hour every day.  (And she never drives over 35 miles per hour).  She is salaried, and the company cares not how long it takes her to do her work.  I, on the other hand, am slave labor right now.  I just spent $500. to spend 160 hours with this woman so she can attest to the State Board of Nursing that I still have what it takes.  It’s a double-edged sword.  The longer our days, the sooner my 160 hours will be completed.  

But, my idea of a work day is to go into the office, do my paperwork and get my ass in the car and start seeing patients.  Munching a nutrition bar while on the run is more my style that taking long lunch breaks.  I don’t even like lunch.  I have started taking my knitting and working on a new shawl while she eats and I have a cup of coffee.  

Today, after lunch at a Japanese restaurant with her daughter-in-law and her three grandchildren, she drove all over north Macon looking at our famous cherry trees in bloom, and they are gloriously beautiful right now, almost at their peak.  Only then did we go to see our patient.  She knows I have a standing date on the other side of town every Thursday at 5:00 with my friends from the Volunteer Medical Clinic, and we should have been back in the office by 3:30.  Instead, we arrived at 5:00 and I was 35 minutes late for my first drink, which I called ahead and had Loren order so it would be sitting in front of me when I arrived.

After bitching and moaning about this woman, Debra Wood, I want to say she is an excellent nurse, and I am learning from her.  Her heart is as big as Kansas, and she is a loving and compassionate person.  I will doubtless be a better nurse for the time I spend with her, but she is as slow as Christmas.  Gasp!  I did it again - the cliché thing.  We just have different styles.  

And I can actually speak English.