The R Word

Another month, another government initiative regarding rape (Committed against women, obviously, since men can't be rape victims).

Rape is a quite singular, abhorrent crime. But it is a difficult one, something I have spoke of before and will no doubt speak of again. Despite some pop cultural themes, rape seldom occurs in dark alleys or wind-swept parks. A woman is more likely to be raped by someone she knows, a partner, ex-partner or 'friend' or some kind.

That said, there is a link between the accused and victim. This link can cloud cases and make them difficult to follow, and make prosecution even harder. A hypothetical case could go something like this, and forgive the simplicity for the moment: Jill accuses Jack of rape. Jack denies any rape occurred. Police investigate the surrounding case, interview people etc. and it turns out Jack and Jill were in a relationship at the time. Relationships are pretty private, so it is Jill's word set against Jack's.

I feel for Inspector Knacker, at this point. Rape is not a clear cut crime, like theft or assault, for example. If Jill accused Jack of stealing some material goods, and he denied such theft, the police finding such goods in Jack's house would count as evidence. There is no such clear cut evidence for rape. If Jack and Jill were in a relationship at the time, much vaunted DNA evidence is pretty moot. Although bruising and other injuries could count as something more of a smoking gun (bruising on the wrists, for example, insinuating some sort of forced holding/restraint), some of these injuries are not clear cut proof, either. Vaginal tearing, for example, can occur during consensual sex, too.

This paints a grim picture of any possible rape prosecution. I support the idea of placing more emphasis on solving cases of rape, and specialist squads are not a terrible idea. Some organisations blame Inspector Knacker for not taking rape seriously. These squads/teams could help reinstall a little faith in the system, and encourage more rape victims to come forward. But I can't help feel this is yet another policy in a long list of ideas which are never fully funded, followed up and backed up. Which is a damned shame.

Edit: Mark Easton makes some great points here, including statistics. He ends on the idea that policing alone can't change conviction rates and even attitudes towards rape, and I couldn't agree with him more. Considering rape within marriage was only made into a crime recently, the country - not just Inspector Knacker - should be ashamed of itself.

Edit ii: Interestingly enough, Mark Easton points out that rape is counted as:

"the penetration of the vagina or anus without consent and penetration of the mouth by a penis without consent."

Why rape against males still doesn't exist in a legal concept, I have no idea in that respect.

The Glass Ceiling Cracks

He's a nurse, he's a man and he's an action figure. And just to make sure it's clear, he's labelled 'Male Nurse'. Oh yes. These times, they are a'changin'. Ha.

On reflection...

So that's it. My time on my Third Ward is over. And, as ever, I'm a little bit teary. So, what's happened? Some friends became enemies, some enemies became friends, in the words of Stewie Griffin. Thus it's time for a little epilogue.

I've met some people who I now respect. That's a good thing. People have been lovely to me today, with nurses and patients bidding me a fond adieu and even the doctors popped by to say goodbye and wish me well. I've impressed some people, and I've made some people happy. That's what I go to school for, so to speak.

10 weeks has been a long time, even if it has felt as if it's passed quickly. Despite the fact the ward was nowhere near as quickly paced as my Second Ward, I'm still in some desperate need of R&R. And going back to University certainly counts as that.

So, in a Crystal Maze sense, Richard O'Brian is telling me that my time is up in this zone. Time to go through some old, plastic tunnels into a new one.

I always liked the Medieval Zone, myself. Although, in healthcare, this might be an unfortunately pertinent metaphor.

Last Shift #3

So, this shift coming up (a late, which is ever so annoying to wait for) is my last one on my current ward. Reflections?

Well, the ward is understaffed, plagued by staff sickness and not amazingly managed. On top of that, it is on the bottom rung on many priorities of departments and bed managers. I believe this makes it a less than positive place to work, nevermind learn.

All in all, I wish my second placement could've been swapped with this one. There was much more left for me to do in a possible three weeks last time, whereas on the current ward 7 weeks would've been more than enough time to experience all there was to do. Additionally, I worked a lot more closely with my mentor last time, which is a way of working more conductive to me, learning-wise.

The ward I'm on currently isn't bad, but it isn't a whirlygig of learning fun, either. Shame, really.

Hate Crimes

Is the current era a bit dramatic, do you think?

I was reading, within the massive organ of investigative journalism that is The Metro, that Stonewall, a pro-homosexual group, has recently found that hate crimes against homosexuals is relatively common. I can't remember the figures, but they were something like 1 in 3 people have suffered a hate crime due to their preference of sexual partner.


The day after this article, a man wrote in shrugging off the study, suggesting that some of these 'hate crimes' could simply be a little bit of name calling. And that name calling occurs in many walks of life, for many reasons (although I assume all these reported 'hate crimes' involved some kind of homophobic slur). A cavalcade of letters followed the day after, lambasting the guy for voicing his opinion.

It got me thinking about this day and age. By now, you may have picked up my general dislike for the term 'hate crime'. It's too emotive for me, personally. Not clinical enough, like many other crime titles. Grevious Bodily Harm is quite descriptive. A Bloody Good Kicking is less so.

Today a patient made a joke about me being a good nurse "for a boy". This is clearly discriminating against me due to my gender. And this is not unusual. Some kind of similar comment is made probably once weekly. Is this a hate crime?

I'm pretty impervious to such jokes. And they are jokes. Light-hearted, if a little ill-considered. And I rebel against most gender stereotypes anyway, so I don't mind. But someone else might mind, and to this someone else such jocular gesticulation could count as a hate crime. To them, I mean. So is hate crime in the eye of the beholder? Where do the boundaries lie?

I personally agree with the first letter writer. There are degrees of jokes/insults. I'm from a regional background which takes a lot of stick for various reasons, but I wouldn't cry 'hate crime!' when someone did an impression of my accent or insinuated something about my character.

But I suppose someone else might.

Once again, it might be a case of me being white-middle-to-lower-class-reasonably-educated-male-trash. We're kinda overlooked by positive discrimination/affirmative action*. If the entire hiring process of nurses changes overnight to admit male candidates until the make-up of the nursing core is more representative of the general population, I'll take this point back. But I won't be popping down the bookies to put any money on that happening just yet.






*Note: Isn't the term AFFIRMATIVE ACTION awesome? It's so American. So much so you can imagine a high-kicking film of the same name. Not a good one, but a film all the same. You know what I mean. It might have Steven Segal in or something.

Pink Arms

Yes, I am currently half-man half-lobster, it's fun. And at least a conversation starter.

Not a large post today. Two things to reflect on, really. Firstly: what a fucking chaotic day. You know one of those days in which you just plain don't get a chance to sit down to yourself? Well, I tell a lie. I grabbed my 15 minutes to eat my sandwiches far too late. What cause chaos? I'm still not sure, but I'll try to chronicle the main events:

* A&E needed to transfer a patient up to HCU
* HCU was full, so needed to transfer a patient to us
* We only had two male beds free, and the patient to be transferred was female
* Thus, we swapped two men from a four-bedded bay into a double room. The women who were in this room were then moved into the four-bedded bay, leaving space for the woman coming up.

That's the simple explanation. Beds and cabinets have to be moved, causing a sort of slow, painful ballet in the hallways. This was not helped by the fact that one of the men, a very peculiar chap, had covered his sheets in something that sounds like 'sheet' but I will call faeces for the technical term. The whole move was a bit of a clit ache. And it got me thinking about the framing situation. A Staff Nurse told me that when something like this had happened before and the bed wasn't freed up in quick time that A&E had placed a critical incident report in.

The balance issue annoys me. Simply put: because of one patient, four have their mornings put out of whack. Washes had to wait, medicines were delayed and there was general distress caused by the move. These patients didn't get a say in it, the bed manager did. Just seems a bit silly to me.

So yes, my personal bay is now a female bay. Which leaves us with only one male bay, which can cause problems. E.g. some male support assistants not wanting to wash female patients and vice versa. The new female bay is actually quite effort intensive. And the two women who were first moved in argue quite frequently. And not like Odd-Couple-Hilarious-Arguments. More bitchy ones.

The older of the two ladies wanted a shower and was happy for me to help her out, which was nice. Although very few women refuse to have male staff members assist with hygiene, I have received my fair share of grudging looks in my time. In fact, she was more worried I'd not want to look at her, which was sweet of her, really.

I still (in the nicest possible way) blag my way around washes, really, having been given no formal instruction. I just ask what the person wants to do and get on with it, insisting they shout at me if anything is not to their liking. This old dear hadn't had a wash in a week, I heard. And that's sad, but I'm not sure of her history in hospital, so can't really comment. And, for once, won't. She was very grateful to have some shampoo rubbed into her scalp, and we got on - despite the pouring water - like a house on fire. It was a nice moment in a crazy day were there was little time to do anything but run around doing favours for my recently returned mentor. Anyway, she's lovely. And it's good to actually look after some women primarily, for once. It's easy, as a male student nurse, to be farmed off to look after male patients, sadly.

Summer in the City

Hot damn. Looking out at the rain now, I find it hard to believe where my sun burn came from today.

I'm tired. The long day took more out of me than I thought. I spent the day reading, playing games and having fun. Whilst fully hydrated, too. Good news.

Right, my expanded review of yesterday.

The New Class

As mentioned, my bay is now inhabited by men with varied, including mental health, non-cardiac disorders. Parkinson's, possible Dementia, a sub-dural haematoma. Allsorts of stuff, and it was quite a shock to be plunged back into. Not that I am under any illusion that I will always get (or want) 'easy' (and by that I mean self-caring, independent and jolly) patients, but it was a seachange. I coped, though.

Teary Oedema

One of the patients in my team (but not in my bay, recently) is a lovely old dear. Bit hard of hearing, suffering from Congestive Cardiac Failure. This means her heart cannot pump effectively, which means fluid can build up around various parts of her body. In her case, she has fluid (oedema) around her lungs, and in the tissue around her legs. This makes it hard for her to walk, and keeps her very short of breath. Because of these things, she buzzes the nursing staff and uses a commode next to her bed.

Generally, she wants to stay independent and I'm happy to encourage that. However, yesterday she was attached to a pair of drips. On transfering on her own she sat on one, and couldn't reach her buzzer. I found her in a right state, crying: so I paniced. Shit - had she ripped her canulla out? Was she in intense amounts of pain?

No. But more importantly she was upset. She told me she felt 'like a fool' for doing it, which I immediately chided her for. But I was quick to comfort her, just talking and being there for her. Chiding was not the order of the day, but comforting worked a lot better. I sat on the floor, chatting with her for a while before going to find her nurse. I think it turned out alright, in the end.

Death

Morbid title, non? One of my newer patients came to us on the palliative pathway, which was something new to deal with. It was something I blagged it, really, just chatting with him and providing cares as he needed them. I chatted man stuff, as much as possible, about women and work and stuff. His discharge was due on Tuesday, going home to spend time with his family and - frankly - die.

On Monday, once he'd pulled me aside and asked, I went down to CT with him twice. These scans seemed completely unnecessary, since he was no longer for active treatment, to me, and seeing him stuck on a trolley in the middle of an NHS corridor was quite sad. Two hours later we were back on ward. He was sitting up in bed, surrounded by his family, smiling. And suddenly I thought: that's it. Morbid or not, that's the way he wanted to die. And it's a good one, you ask me.

Edit: The man from the above section used the old line that, when asked if he had any allergies he'd joke: "Women." The old ones are the best ones. I was talking to him at length about it and, with a tear in his eye, he told me: "Not the wife. She's the only one I'm not allergic to." God, it made me feel better about birds, who have not been my favourite demographic in recent days. The female population may be generally silly, but it's good to know there are exceptions. I'd forgotten about them for a little while, but it was a sweet reminder from a sweet gentleman.