Kristy Chambers - Get Well Soon!: My (Un)Brilliant Career as a Nurse

Kristy Chambers was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1975. After graduating from university as a nurse at age thirty, she worked in several hospitals around Australia and wrote this memoir. It is her first book, if you dont count the novel she wrote in her mid-twenties and eventually shredded, which was no great loss for the literary world, only the trees.

She currently lives in Brisbane, intends to run away to New York City for a while and is uncomfortable speaking about herself in the third person because its weird.

For my Mum and Dad, who are the best.

Contents

I n the Beginning

I first tried nursing on for size when I was 15 and went to the Goulburn Valley Base Hospital for two weeks of work experience. Everybody said nursing was a good idea my parents, my teachers and the school careers advisor, none of whom were nurses.

Its a great job! they chorused. Youll never be unemployed! You can help people and see the world!

I had my tonsils removed when I was seven and, as far as I knew, nurses were just the nice people who brought you ice-cream and jelly in hospital. What I thought was a nurse was actually a waitress, so when I said Id give nursing a shot, I was in for a rude shock.

On my first work-experience day at the hospital there was ice-cream and jelly, just as I remembered. But there was also skin that looked and smelled like a rotten potato, adults wearing nappies, ulcers, pus, missing limbs and fingers, green plastic bowls full of poo, phlegm and vomit, tracheotomies and people crying. I wanted out. Nursing was shithouse.

I made it through the first week.

Maybe youd like to be a midwife? Work with babies? one of the nurses suggested at the start of my second week.

Yeah, maybe, I agreed. Babies are cute and smell better than old people. So I went to the maternity ward for a day and they showed me a video of a woman giving birth. Her water broke, splashing all over the floor. Then she was down on all fours, mewing and moaning like a wounded animal while a babys head came out of her, and I thought I might vomit. Now, not only did I not want to be a midwife or any other kind of nurse, I also no longer wanted to be female.

On my last day, the nurses asked me if I was going to be one of them, and I thought about it for half a second.

Um, no offence, I said, but there is no way on earth I would be a nurse... I wouldnt mind being a doctor, though. Nobody tells them what to do.

They all laughed, and said that was fair enough, and I felt a bit sorry for them. I was 15, and sure I was destined for bigger and better things.

Apparently not.

The question that a lot of people like to ask is: How long have you been a nurse?

Depending on the day, and how Im feeling, I might just say, A couple of years now, or Ill vent, A few years but it feels much, much longer.

The next question is usually, And do you enjoy nursing? and the response, again, hinges on my mood.

Oh, its pretty good, I guess, I might say, or, I like the bit where I go on holidays. Or, Right now Im trying to figure out what else I can do with my life so I dont end up throwing myself in front of a train.

And even when I badmouth the hell out of nursing, most people empathise and nod their heads, saying, Well, I could never do your job, thats for sure!

What do you do? I ask, and they say things like, Oh, Im an accountant, or, I work in IT, or, Im a beautician and I wax peoples swimsuit areas all day long.

And I think, Shit, your job sounds awful, nursings not that bad .

But some days, it really is.

I never had a strong inkling where a career was concerned. I only knew what I liked, and that there was no such thing as a job being a globe-travelling, booze-swilling, notebook-scribbling bourgeois pig, so I was screwed. I was going to have to marry well or work for a living, and since I didnt have a boyfriend, the wedding option seemed pretty unlikely. Employment beckoned, and I resented it greatly. I was born resentful.

I wandered around, lost, for a decade. An early attempt to study Creative Arts was hampered by my intolerance for the rampant wankery wrapped around it, so I spent some quality time on the dole, then worked a bunch of jobs I neither liked nor cared about before finally running away to London. After a couple of years spent in English pubs, as both an employee and a lush, I returned home just as spectacularly unqualified and work-shy as ever, but my most notable work-related achievement was now the time I headbutted Jude Law in the chest when I tripped in a Soho street on my way to pick up coffee for my boss.

My family collected me from the airport, and before we had even left the car park I wanted them to turn the car around; Australia seemed sleepy and boring and dry and brown. I was going to have to dig my way out of the hole I was in, as I had used up my allotted working visa, and because my grandparents had selfishly decided to be born in Australia instead of in Scotland like their parents had been, I was stuck. My future looked like a giant, gaping chasm of nothingness and I could barely stomach the thought of another shit job, so I was going to have to study something.

I narrowed it down to nursing or teaching, jobs with good prospects for overseas employment and which seemed meaningful enough not to drive me to despair. And while the thought of going back to school at 26 filled me with dread, the fear of being trapped in menial-job purgatory forever was far greater. I took a cue from my younger brother, who was in the first year of his nursing degree and liked it well enough, put in a last-minute application and crossed my fingers. In retrospect, my brother may not have been the most fitting example for me to follow. He worked part-time in a nursing home and liked it, while I worked in a nursing home once and cried , then went home and drank a bottle of wine to try to forget about it. Still, the decision was made, and a few months later I found out that I had been accepted. I was going to be a motherfucking nurse . The 15-year-old me shook her head in disgust and called me a dildo, but she hadnt yet spent a year working in a supermarket and hating it with a passion, so I paid her no mind.

Having a sense of purpose was refreshing for me, and for my parents, and, for the first few months of study at least, I was excited. I went to all my lectures and tutorials and even though I felt very old, I also felt very superior to all the school leavers who didnt know shit about shit, and youthful in comparison to some of the other mature-age students, who looked older than the automobile. Actually using my brain, and using it for good instead of evil, was probably the best part of university for me, but before long my limited attention span crashed, and the novelty of education began to tarnish.

By the end of my first academically lacklustre year, I felt increasingly uneasy and worried that I had barked up the wrong tree by choosing nursing, because I could already tell I didnt much like where it was leading. I had just finished my first two-week placement in an oncology ward, time primarily spent showering old people and helping them off the toilet, and I hadnt loved it. At all . I thought about switching to a degree in education, now that I had a full year of study under my belt, because I quite liked the idea of being an English teacher and talking about books and writing and teaching kids how to spell. But I was all too aware that teenagers were arseholes, since I had been one myself, and that I would probably scream myself hoarse just trying to get anyone to listen to me, let alone learn anything. The positive of teaching was that I would get three months holiday each year and I wouldnt have to see old people naked or deal, literally, with other peoples shit. The negative was that I would have to be a teacher. So it became a matter of deciding who I least wanted to spend time with: teenagers or sick people.