Significant events of the year, part one: new job

I had been waiting for a long time to get a job as a community nurse. I may have had slightly high expectations of how much my life would change because I spent eighteen months thinking 'this wouldn't happen in the community!' I imagined that the new job would be like the old job without the bad bits. I thought that those lovely moments in nursing where you've got a quiet ward and you get to spend all morning helping an elderly person to have a wash and do their hair while they tell you their life story, would stretch over my whole week and the hideous bits where pcp patients can't breathe and you start to feel sick and jittery knowing what's coming next, would disappear. What I hadn't considered was the notion that the job would just be entirely different. There are certainly very few 'jesus-fuck-what-am-I-going-to-do-should-I-call-the- crash-team-why-didn't-I-listen-more-closely-in-lectures' moments. Sadly though, the pay off for not being there for people in the gritty bits is that, um, you don't get to be there in the gritty bits. Most of my patients greet me with a friendly smile but the wee transaction I have with them hardly seems more significant than the one they have with the postman every morning. One lady I visited asked me to come back later because the mobile hairdresser was due and apparently she has a very busy schedule. Makes me kind of miss washing dead people.

On the upside, one cracking aspect of the new job is that I get to have a good nose round people's houses. Who knew that people still had toilet roll holders with built in ash-trays? (I mean the standing up on a pole toilet roll holders there - just in case you're imagining a crocheted doll holding an ashtray aloft.) And some interesting situations do arise that would never have come up in hospital, a man who had only grunted at you as you changed his catheter suddenly jumping off the sofa to show your colleague his cabinet full of nazi memorabilia, including a rather large sword, for example. Yikes.