Wow.

I've had one of those 'did that really just happen?' days.

Believe it or not, one of the considerations I'm taking into account when trying to pick the field of nursing I'd like to go into is 'do they wear scrubs?'. Simply put, I had my first genuine encounter with these amazingly comfortable articles of clothing today and I loved them. My normal nurse's uniform is a hair shirt compared to those. I want to spend the rest of my working life wearing scrub suits, please.

I also spent my first day in an operating theater and I loved that too. I'm now really looking forward to Critical Care and don't care where they put me. Previously I was thinking 'if they give me a theatre placement, I am going to be pissed off'. Now, however, I genuinely don't mind where I go. Theatres and me have mixed far better than I thought we ever would and I have discovered, much to my delight, that I am Not Squeamish At All. This is quite funny, because I cringe at cinematic blood and gore (to illustrate: I spent about a third of the movie 'Gladiator' with my eyes closed). Real blood and gore, though, doesn't seem to bother me one bit. This makes me the opposite of one of those big guys who love violent movies and faint at accidents, I guess. I was worried about that, but no. Not squeamish. There goes my last concern about wheter or not I'm fundamentally cut out for nursing.

This placement is turning out a hell of a lot better than I thought it would.

No, this isn't going to be a regular thing. It wasn't supposed to happen at all. I was assigned to spend a day working in the birthing center at the hospital I am placed at - the BBC. devida mentioned the 'joys' of a placement in the BBC in her LJ somewhat earlier, and so did the midwife on the ward I was 'working' on yesterday, which really was an experience in creative boredom. Long story short, I was expecting to have a dull, dull day and in all fairness I was due to have just that. When I arrived there was one lone woman there giving birth and she didn't want students in. So I stood around getting very, very bored. This went on for about twenty minutes, until the Boss Midwife (what do they call these people, anyway?) took pity on me and told me that she couldn't see me getting to see anything if I stuck round, why didn't I go over to the normal, non-trendy Delivery Suite on the other side of the corridor.

I went. Who wouldn't?

Within ten minutes of my arriving, the very nice staff members there had found me someone to shadow for the day. This woman was a midwife, but she had been assigned to spend the day working in theatres, assisting at elective Caesarian sections ('CS' hereafter because spelling 'Caesarian' all the time is a pain). Now, every time I have tried to go to theatres I have been thwarted at the last minute so I could barely believe how casually this was suggested. I can't go into much more detal than this because of patient confidentiality and the utter lack of it available on the Internet, but let me just say that I saw three women delivered by CS today and it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life.

I also had the admittedly cool experience of walking past a classmate wearing my scrub suit and surgical cap, saying hi to her and not being immediately recognized. I blame the scrub suit and surgical cap. :)

... our tutor told us, 'don't expect to see a CS'. Loads of the class wanted to do this and were told it probably wasn't going to happen. Ironically, I was one of the ones who didn't mind either way. And I've now seen three. I've also seen an epidural being put in, something else we were told we may very well not see and shouldn't put as an objective. Damn, now I wish I'd ignored her.

I take back some of the pissy things I said about this placement. What I've seen today made it all more than worth my while. Excited new fathers have got to be the cutest things ever. Even cuter than the babies. This one young guy couldn't have stopped smiling if he tried once his baby was born and it really was a sight to see: even your blase narrator here was almost in tears at one point. I've changed my mind about childbirth, even unnatural - it really is a pretty damn amazing process. Well, people do change their minds when they get older, don't they?

I really need to stop listening to Weiss songs.