JUST CALL ME NURSE LARRY

In my spam folder the other day, there was this: “Are you looking to accelerate your nursing career and shape the future of healthcare?”

I’ve had a career in nursing? Hey, I’m 85 and don’t remember things as well as I used to. I seem to recall I spent more than 40 years in newsrooms. Nursing and journalism do have a few things in common, including lots of lousy hours and eating and sleeping at unnatural times of the day. During my overnight shifts (midnight to 8 a.m. or thereabouts), I had breakfast before heading to work and dinner — meat and potatoes — when I got home around 9:30 a.m.

Nurses have to deal with a number of cranky people known as patients. Same goes for newsroom editors and producers working with difficult people known as anchors or writers. And there’s hand-holding in both professions. Nurses do it to comfort folks. Editors do it to try to get anchors and writers to put solid stories on the air or in print.

So far I’ve avoided any discussion of what must be the highlight of medical school for some would-be nurses — catheters. How do you learn to do that? Whom or is it who do you practice on? Here again, good nurses and good journalists have something in common. When an editor working with an anchor or writer who’s always looking for an argument, devises a means of defusing and calming that person down — in other words taking the piss and vinegar out of him — -is that not a form of catheterization?

I guess maybe the next time someone asks me what I used to do ages ago, I’ll say I was a journalist AND a nurse.