A nurse friend was complaining that she was gonna have to work both Thanksgiving and Christmas day. Well welcome to the club. It seems all my nursing career I had to work on the holidays. Hospitals, with their usual shortsightedness, would short staff floors on holidays, with the assumption that it's a holiday--everybody will be at home, things will be quiet. WRONG!

Holidays are when people get drunk, get depressed and overdose, shoot one another, have car wrecks, have domestic disturbances, get food poisoning, ad nauseum, (if you'll excuse the expression.) Dialysis patients would eat everything they weren't supposed to and have to come in for emergency dialysis. We were always busier than usual on holidays. Hospital administration with those cockeyed ideas of "quiet holidays" should've been pulled out of bed and forced to get their butts to the floor to work down in the trenches with us.

Thinking about nursing reminded me of some of the nurses I worked with. In San Antonio there were about five military bases--Kelly, Lackland,Randolph, Brook AFB's and Ft. Sam Houston Army base, where my two offspring were born in the early 60's. The huge military presence meant men marrying women from all over the world and the US, so the bases were very cosmopolitan.

I worked with three nurses from Germany, one from Scotland, one from Ireland, England etc. There was also a really sweet Mormon LPN who gave me a Mormon Bible. There was a fine nurse from Massachusetts whose cap looked like an frilly upside down cupcake liner. (She's the one who knew the innards about the Kennedy family, as she was raised near Hyannisport. JFK was our new president.)

The German nurses were in a class by themselves. One was a middle aged stern lady whom when you passed her in the hall, you had the urge to do a "Heil Hitler" salute. One of the other German nurses said that wasn't far wrong, and accused her of working for the kinder program under Hitler's regime. There was bad feelings between them, so they were sent to work on different floors.

The Scotland nurse told me how to make haggis, the national dish of Scotland. You take a sheep's stomach and put oatmeal and other ingredients in it and boil the whole thing. Well forgive me, I'll pass on that. I was pregnant at the time and got sick just hearing about it.

Okay I'll shut up, and apologize for being so wordy. susil