Written by Gail Allan, Centre for Organizational Learning

Teaching Nursing – Anecdotes to Tickle your Funny Bone

Teachers have all had moments when an incident didn’t seem so funny at the time but in reminiscing, we can see the humour in it. Well, in my 25 years of teaching Nursing, I have memories of many, many such incidences. Here are a few and I hope you can find the humour in them as well.

• The distraught student couldn’t understand why she had failed an essay assignment for the Nursing Professionalism course. I tried as gently as I could to explain that submitting an essay on “The Youth in Asia” did not meet the requirements for taking a position on “Euthanasia”.

• The strict dress code for student nurses in the clinical area was unbending at a community college I taught at in Montreal. So, when the student appeared on the hospital ward dressed in black oxfords, I demanded that she put on her white nursing shoes. She argued with me up and down that since these were her “church shoes”, they were blessed, germ-free, and would in fact help her to heal her patients. Did she win the argument?

• It was 8:00 am and the morning seemed to be getting off to a good start. Every student nurse had come prepared for their patient assignments and they had ventured into their rooms to start the morning care. All of a sudden, I heard a male’s voice screaming at the top of his lungs, “Get her out of here!” It was coming from the room where “Miss Church Shoes” was assigned. I headed for the room dreading what I would find. There she was -- backed into the corner of the shower trying not to get her uniform wet and the patient was like a madman yelling at her, then at me. It didn’t help that he was recovering from a heart attack. Swift thoughts of a Montreal Gazette headline, “Student Nurse kills patient but he was scrubbed clean within an inch of his life”, ran through my head as I tried to make sense out of this situation. I took Miss Church Shoes into my office, the linen cupboard, and we had a chat. Once again she had a perfectly reasonable, or so she thought explanation. The doctor’s orders on the chart read “Shower with help.” So what was the problem? What better help could he get than the nurse in the shower with him?

• In my early teaching days, I was understandably nervous teaching labs that involved anything to do with “private parts”. One incident helped me get over these nerves. I was demonstrating how to give a patient a bed bath following the principles of efficiency and privacy. It’s important to pause here and stress that this was the first lab in the Fall term which meant that the mannequin, affectionately known as Mrs. Chase, had been stored in a cupboard all summer. I showed the students how to carefully drape her legs and torso so only the “private parts” were exposed. As I positioned Mrs. Chase’s heels together, a giant, well-fed housefly wandered out of her vagina and moseyed on up to rest on one of her knees.  After a round of laughter that has us in tears, we got on with the lab. I never had “private parts” nerves after that.

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Have a short anecdote that you would like to share in a future issues of Live, Laugh, Learn?  Email them to at livelaughlearn@algonquincollege.com. 

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