Nurses. Gah.
I was married to one. When she and I were first living together she was working in Intensive Care and used to come home with tales of homeless people who came in with maggots living in their festering wounds and the old woman who was admitted with spiders living in her hair and biting her scalp because she hadn't washed it in so long. Since she and I generally were talking over dinner at the time, it was pretty difficult to eat anything with rice. I finally informed her that if she didn't knock it off I was going to move out within the week- which was met by blank amazement, as she couldn't understand why I didn't want to listen to what she did at work that day.

Her mother is even worse- she used to be a nurse at a nursing home. Additionally she was remarkably like Doris Day on acid- she wanted to be a perfect 1950s housewife and tried to do all kinds of "thrifty" things like making potscrubbers out of onion bags. So on the day when she was talking about someone having kidney stones, she didn't notice me looking increasingly green, and she went into a description of how they were staghorn stones, so called because they were all through the kidney and looked like antlers- so I turned to my wife and exclaimed, "And if you spray paint them gold they make lovely Christmas ornaments!"

And then there's my friend Rob. He's doing his practical in nursing school right now, and recently he went into great detail about Foley catheters and how one guy ripped his out the other day, and his meatus was stretched out from being catheterized so much. (That word is pronounced me-AT-us, by the way.) He didn't notice me shuddering at first, and was going on about how difficult it is to catheterize someone when I commented that it must make it hard to be-AT-us the me-AT-us...

He also told me that he gets a fair amount of grief from other guys about being a nurse. I told him that he should look those guys in the eye and say, "The other day I had to catheterize a 350 pound 70 year old woman. You think you'd be man enough to do that?"
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Sat 8 Sep 2007, 2:00, Reply)