The Lecture

Winning entry in Grace's 'Disgust and Repugnance' competition. Please check out the thread for more amazing prose and poems.

[url]http://deepundergroundpoetry.com/forum/competitions/read/7701/ [/url]




The ergonomic shaped electronic lecture aide always serves as a comforting presence to help centre that stomach squirming nervousness one always feels when standing in front of a large crowd of people. As I gaze out at the crowd of a hundred or so second-year nursing students, the sea of young faces reminds me of my own starting point in my nursing career. Eager to impress upon these recruits the raw messy nature of the clinical world they were about to embark upon, I elect to commence my lecture with an engaging stomach churning anecdote. For some reason they always seem to enjoy the blood and guts stories the most.

Let me set the stage:

It was my graduate year as a registered nurse. I had been posted on a general medical ward, which translated to a place where acutely unwell nursing home patients were lobbed in an effort to save them from toppling over the edge. It was a realm of hard, back-breaking nursing work. The kind of place where you cut your teeth on basic skills such as clinical observations, hygiene, and medication administration.

At the tail end of one particular night shift, I had been nominally placed in charge of one half of the ward, equating to sixteen patients. My time this night had been largely monopolised by Mrs Smith. She had been brought in with a high fever and acute confusion. In amongst the myriad of tasks  involved with caring for Mrs Smith (such as administering intravenous antibiotics and answering call bells to reassure her that her Geoffrey was safe at home), attending her toileting via bed pans was, perhaps, the most challenging. The reason being she was suffering a urinary tract infection as the cause of her sepsis. It was turning this most basic of nursing tasks into a putridly, pungent undertaking.

While I appreciate that the following description could be considered unnecessary, I feel it imperative to convey the nature of the fluids I was called to manage, the importance of which will be revealed shortly. Imagine, if you will, a cloudy, yellow soup. The contents being particulate precipitate, reminiscent of mashed corn. In addition to the confronting appearance, it was accompanied by a most foul smell. Something akin to days old sardines left in a car on a hot summer day, mixed with acrid, fermented citrus. Vile, in a mouth-breathing, breath-holding olfactory assault kind of way.

It was nearing the end of my shift and I was dealing with what, I hoped, was my last bed-pan of Mrs Smith’s special brew. In my sand papered eyeball tired state, I had placed the bed-pan, containing its nasty contents, beneath her bed while I attended to making her more comfortable by adjusting covers and pillows. In my haste to finish, I had forgotten about the placement of the unpleasant bed pan containing the disgusting liquid. In a shuffling, rushed step, the edge of my shoe managed to catch the edge of the pan, tipping its contents in a wave of unwholesome spillage into my sock and shoe. It took mere moments to realise the warm spreading repercussions of my error.

It required every ounce of remaining willpower to stifle a scream of frustration. My anger manifested, instead, as a snorting giggle, which rapidly cooled my overtired temper. This, once seen in hindsight, was not an appropriate response in parallel with the obscene fluid wending its way beneath my foot and between my toes in squelching purulence.
To this day, I can clearly recall the nose wrinkling affront of the initial removal of my corrupted footwear and the accompanying offensive, sucking drag of my sock. Complete with roiling wave of obnoxious odour. While I was beyond nausea, even at this early stage of my career, I recall a brief period of vertigo on the final sopping release of the befouled garment.

Disgusting and repugnant? Definitely. The tale has become part of my personal nursing legend, a stripe earned in our professions’ bodily fluid based rite of passage.

                                                 ****

The final point is punctuated with a burst of laughing conversation across the lecture theatre. As the wave of amused discussion and quiet giggles is slowly replaced with respectful attentive silence, a smile enters the tone of my voice.

“Now that I have your attention, let’s discuss the pathophysiology of urinary sepsis…”