Mining for Gold -
Apr. 8th, 2007 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyburgI swear, this is information one only comes to by accident.
I've said my mother had a long career as a nurse before retiring in her mid 70's - after entering the field during WWII. You know these things, being a child and watching your mother go to work in whites year after year - I've got pictures of me with birthday cakes and my mother in her nurse's uniform, for crying out loud.
What I didn't know, for example, was that she had been one of the first nurses to give penicillin when it was first introduced - I found that out when Cliff got MRSA. (For the record, it was very toxic, came in wax tablets that you had to melt it over a candle flame and give by injection.)
I found out what her first job after WWII had been, when Jim arrived - and they began talking shop about taking X-rays. She had been taking X-rays in a doctor's office where she got a significant amount of direct beam radiation - she quit that job after two miscarriages, with a hemoglobin of 5. At the time, nobody really knew or monitored radiation exposure - it was just too new.
I've told Jim that getting these tidbits out of her was like mining for gold - you literally had to ask just the right question, lead the conversations to the right places because so much of the information just doesn't come up in normal conversation. She has a real thing about keeping unpleasant things out of polite conversation - and I don't think it's intentional.
But the conversation yesterday went into continuing education, and Jim's experience with keeping up CEUs and the opportunities the employer provides, what kinds of topics are covered and so on.
I'll warn you now. The rest of this story deals with both cruelty to animals and to people. Don't look if this really is something you don't want to know.
Keep in mind, this is easily 35+, probably closer to 40 years ago.
I remember having to spend at least one night's worth of classes in the car, in the parking lot at University of Riverside, while Mom was inside getting taught cardiac care. I remember her taking home EKG strips in her pockets and showing them to us. At the time, "Emergency" would soon be one of the most popular shows on prime time television, and all of the technology involved was Big Stuff - and all brand new. (Go back and watch the first season episodes, if you can get them. Get into that headspace - it was more true to life than anything I've seen since.)
It was critical to Mom's job that she get this training in, so she could work in the ICU.
I remember University of Riverside - I could even take you to the parking lot. Show you the building. I might have been seven.
What I didn't know about was that Mom had taken a similar course at Loma Linda prior. And hadn't completed it.
She had attended every class. Including the final exam.
Which involved "a beautiful German Shepherd."
The final exam?
They electrocuted the dog to put him into v-fib (cardiac arrest), and you had to bring him back using the defibrillator. She said there were 10, 12 students in the class. And they killed the dog, over and over, each student having to put themselves in the position of causing that kind of pain to a healthy living creature - to verify that the students understood the mechanisms and could perform the act.
Mom failed the final. She wouldn't do it. She couldn't.
Her job is on the line, she's recently widowed with four children, three under the age of reason - and she won't torture an innocent animal to pass the class to keep her job. I'm so proud I could bust.
And so livid I want to go back in time and electrocute every last one of those assholes personally. Unfair, my mind is screaming. To the animal, to the students - my poor Mom!
Today, they would at the very least anesthetize the animal. I seriously doubt anyone would allow such a thing at all. Forty years ago, this was the simulaide - and remember, Loma Linda is where they did the cross-species heart transplant using baboons back in the day. Animal research is a very clinical term for things Nobody Talks About. Milgram-style experiments. Things that really test just how far one is willing to go to reach a goal. That said, I'll also maintain Loma Linda is one of the finest teaching university hospitals of its kind in the entire country. It certain is one of the oldest.
Entirely vegetarian, Seventh-Day Adventist facilities. You can't even buy a Coke with caffeine in it at a vending machine.
And this happened THERE.
Mom went out and found a better class. My response to this confession was "Well, after retiring, after what - 50 some years, over 35 to the same employer? I don't think failing that class had a whole lot to do with anything, Mom."
Bill Frist says he adopted cats from the shelter and killed them to better his surgical technique. (Mom is also the lifelong Republican, BTW.) At least he admitted it - in Mom's case, she wouldn't be a party to it.
The way she described how the dog howled broke my heart. It obviously had broken hers.
No, there are things one must do in life. This is also proof that there are things one does Not Have To Be Part Of to survive.
And PETA did not come together as an organization in a vacuum. Mom was also the one who joined Greenpeace there for a while - some of that activism now makes sense.
There were years when I worked in the same hospital she did - she as a nursing supervisor, me as a pharmacy messenger - and I got to see her on the job, doing what she had been trained to do. I've never been anything but proud of her.
Is it ego that today, I pity people who didn't have a parent like mine?
82 in a week or so, and she still surprises me.
Go Mom. God love you.
I've said my mother had a long career as a nurse before retiring in her mid 70's - after entering the field during WWII. You know these things, being a child and watching your mother go to work in whites year after year - I've got pictures of me with birthday cakes and my mother in her nurse's uniform, for crying out loud.
What I didn't know, for example, was that she had been one of the first nurses to give penicillin when it was first introduced - I found that out when Cliff got MRSA. (For the record, it was very toxic, came in wax tablets that you had to melt it over a candle flame and give by injection.)
I found out what her first job after WWII had been, when Jim arrived - and they began talking shop about taking X-rays. She had been taking X-rays in a doctor's office where she got a significant amount of direct beam radiation - she quit that job after two miscarriages, with a hemoglobin of 5. At the time, nobody really knew or monitored radiation exposure - it was just too new.
I've told Jim that getting these tidbits out of her was like mining for gold - you literally had to ask just the right question, lead the conversations to the right places because so much of the information just doesn't come up in normal conversation. She has a real thing about keeping unpleasant things out of polite conversation - and I don't think it's intentional.
But the conversation yesterday went into continuing education, and Jim's experience with keeping up CEUs and the opportunities the employer provides, what kinds of topics are covered and so on.
I'll warn you now. The rest of this story deals with both cruelty to animals and to people. Don't look if this really is something you don't want to know.
Keep in mind, this is easily 35+, probably closer to 40 years ago.
I remember having to spend at least one night's worth of classes in the car, in the parking lot at University of Riverside, while Mom was inside getting taught cardiac care. I remember her taking home EKG strips in her pockets and showing them to us. At the time, "Emergency" would soon be one of the most popular shows on prime time television, and all of the technology involved was Big Stuff - and all brand new. (Go back and watch the first season episodes, if you can get them. Get into that headspace - it was more true to life than anything I've seen since.)
It was critical to Mom's job that she get this training in, so she could work in the ICU.
I remember University of Riverside - I could even take you to the parking lot. Show you the building. I might have been seven.
What I didn't know about was that Mom had taken a similar course at Loma Linda prior. And hadn't completed it.
She had attended every class. Including the final exam.
Which involved "a beautiful German Shepherd."
The final exam?
They electrocuted the dog to put him into v-fib (cardiac arrest), and you had to bring him back using the defibrillator. She said there were 10, 12 students in the class. And they killed the dog, over and over, each student having to put themselves in the position of causing that kind of pain to a healthy living creature - to verify that the students understood the mechanisms and could perform the act.
Mom failed the final. She wouldn't do it. She couldn't.
Her job is on the line, she's recently widowed with four children, three under the age of reason - and she won't torture an innocent animal to pass the class to keep her job. I'm so proud I could bust.
And so livid I want to go back in time and electrocute every last one of those assholes personally. Unfair, my mind is screaming. To the animal, to the students - my poor Mom!
Today, they would at the very least anesthetize the animal. I seriously doubt anyone would allow such a thing at all. Forty years ago, this was the simulaide - and remember, Loma Linda is where they did the cross-species heart transplant using baboons back in the day. Animal research is a very clinical term for things Nobody Talks About. Milgram-style experiments. Things that really test just how far one is willing to go to reach a goal. That said, I'll also maintain Loma Linda is one of the finest teaching university hospitals of its kind in the entire country. It certain is one of the oldest.
Entirely vegetarian, Seventh-Day Adventist facilities. You can't even buy a Coke with caffeine in it at a vending machine.
And this happened THERE.
Mom went out and found a better class. My response to this confession was "Well, after retiring, after what - 50 some years, over 35 to the same employer? I don't think failing that class had a whole lot to do with anything, Mom."
Bill Frist says he adopted cats from the shelter and killed them to better his surgical technique. (Mom is also the lifelong Republican, BTW.) At least he admitted it - in Mom's case, she wouldn't be a party to it.
The way she described how the dog howled broke my heart. It obviously had broken hers.
No, there are things one must do in life. This is also proof that there are things one does Not Have To Be Part Of to survive.
And PETA did not come together as an organization in a vacuum. Mom was also the one who joined Greenpeace there for a while - some of that activism now makes sense.
There were years when I worked in the same hospital she did - she as a nursing supervisor, me as a pharmacy messenger - and I got to see her on the job, doing what she had been trained to do. I've never been anything but proud of her.
Is it ego that today, I pity people who didn't have a parent like mine?
82 in a week or so, and she still surprises me.
Go Mom. God love you.
