Love on Wheelz

Sometimes I question the effectiveness of nursing schools. The “nurses” that slip through the cracks are wildly incompetent and in no way capable of caring for newborn puppies, much less medically dependent people. It’s understandable that unqualified employees sneak passed filters in most professions, but nursing deals with human lives. It should be held to a higher standard.
That said, Bobby wasn’t incompetent – at least not completely.

Bobby stood about 5’11 with frizzled natural spiky hair that was steadily retreating from his forehead. He wore thick glasses, blue jeans and was a big fan of Spongebob Squarepants, Macbooks, computers in general and (most importantly) Jesus Christ of Nazareth. In his late-thirties, he lived with two roommates. Overall though, he was a nice guy and I liked him.
He played Wolfenstein and introduced me to 3D modeling by bringing me a humongous Lightwave tutorial book. I stayed up late at night while he read aloud step-by-step instructions on how to build a set of stairs.
His downfall was not his nursing skills, despite them being average at best. Instead, it was his memory that failed him. He often forgot to do the simple tasks — non-essential stuff like giving my brother his medicine or cleaning the tracheotomy site. But those were the little things.
“Bobby.” It was late and I needed assistance. He was on the couch with the macbook on his lap surfing the internet. The screen reflected off his glasses making it so I couldn’t see his eyes.
“Bobby!” still no response.
“Booooooobbbbbbbyyyyyy!” he was asleep again. He didn’t seem to understand the concept of alertness, or he just couldn’t stay awake. I suspect it was the latter. I don’t think he was intentionally negligent; he didn’t have much malice in him, if at all. He was a childish nerd in a middle-aged man’s body.
Another time before leaving he asked me, “Do you mind if I borrow the first season of Spongebob?”
“Uh… ask my brother. It’s his.”
He turned to him expectantly. Much like when one of your little cousins asks you to borrow a video game, “Oh, uh, sure.” my brother said confused
“Thank you,” he smiled, “I’ll bring it back soon.”
He also talked about the future of computers a lot. “One day, man,” his eyes bulged in his head, “instead of the operating systems we have now, we’ll only have a screen with a cube and you’ll be able to rotate it,” he gestured rotating a cube with his hands and made an O shape with his mouth, “and you’ll just click on the different sides to work it.” He chuckled nervously, “I’ve seen some cool stuff, man.”
Ultimately what forced my parents to fire him was what I like to call the Heater Incident. I actually just made that up, but we’ll go with it because it sounds cool.
It was around 6:30 in the morning when I woke up because I needed to turn or be repositioned or something. Bobby was sleeping on a couch in the room. After I managed to wake him, he got up and turned me. He then noticed that the heater didn’t have any water. Wiping off his glasses and rubbing his eyes, he shuffled over to the pantry.
Now, there’s something you need to know about where we buy our supplies. Things are cheaper in Mexico. Our gallons of water look just like gallons of vinegar except for one difference: the water has a big blue label and vinegar has a red label. An alert person would notice that.
“What’s that smell?” I asked after he poured it in. The smell got stronger by the second and pretty soon I started gagging. If you’ve ever smelled vinegar you’ll know that it’s awful. Now imagine that smell permeating every oxygen molecule you inhale. Bobby knocked on my mom’s door.
“Uh… I need help. I need someone to bag him while I clean out the heater.”
“What happened?” my mom stumbled out of her room.
“I seem to have uh…” he looked at the floor, “…put vinegar in the heater.”
“What?! How?” she asked, annoyed at his exceptional incompetence.
“I, uh,…” he scratched his head. As if he wasn’t sure himself, “Heh. Wasn’t paying attention.” he trailed off. My mom rolled her eyes behind his back and went right back to bed after he fixed it.
“Sorry about that.” he told me.
“It’s okay.” I lied. I could tell by my mom’s reaction that she’d had enough. He wasn’t lasting another day. And he didn’t. My mom called the agency in the morning and asked them to find someone else.
I miss his nerdiness. I miss playing video games late at night and building 3d models of houses. What I don’t miss is worrying that he wouldn’t wake up if I got unplugged. There’s nothing more nerve-racking than wondering if you’ll make it until morning. It’s not exactly conducive to a good nights sleep. As much as I liked him, it wasn’t enough to place my life in his hands.
We later found out that the company fired him because he was working with an expired license. You’d think they would check for that kind of stuff. It’d be like working for Google with your computer science degree from 1998 after not having kept up with any of the new languages. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the company’s hiring practices.
If these are the people that run the nursing schools then it’s no wonder nurses like Bobby end up bumbling their way from one life and death situation to the next.

This entry was posted on May 21, 2009 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Blog. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.