Nurses...

“How's your knee?”

“Miss Ann's a nurse.”

“Did she say you are going to live?”

My daughter had bashed her knee pretty well on her bike. The only thing that helped was wrapping it in an ace bandage.

“Miss Ann doesn't make me straighten my leg when she wraps it. And she's a nurse.”

Miss Ann was a friend of the family, and being a nurse, the source of all medical knowledge to my impressionable daughter. She is also, in a word, a putz. She didn't go through four years of wrestling with a bad knee. Everyone knows that if you have to wrap your knee with an ace bandage, you stand up with your heal on a coke can and your toes on the floor. This gives the perfect natural bend to your knee. For the record, I did not tell my daughter to stand up on her bad knee. But after three days of ice and wrapping (plus the fact that I saw her running and jumping around as I walked through the door) I figured she was well on the road to recovery.

Before I go any further, I don't want you to think just because I called Miss Ann a putz, that I think all nurses are evil spawns of the devil. The fact that she, after (I'm guessing) years of medical training, still uses the phrase, “I don't get sunburned” (and she is not young enough to be naive either.). I know this because our dinner conversation started with my wife asking, “Guess where Miss Ann spent the day?”

“Hellooooo,” (My daughter has perfected condescending sarcasm with everyone now, not just me.) “She was at my school today.”

My daughter's grade had their Summer Olympics and apparently conned quite a few unsuspecting parents into attending. Since it's the end of the year, they get the kids outside to exercise, build self-esteem (from my limited understanding, some of the teachers participate too, so it has an element of humor as well) and thanks to Miss Ann, all the first graders learned two very important lessons.

They learned what the phrase famous last words really means. “I don't sunburn” actually means “and after years of medical training and life experiences, I still won't put on sunscreen because a trip to hospital for second degree burns sounds like a fun way to spend the afternoon.” (Yes, I've written blogs about my sunburns. Those were all beyond my control. I applied sunscreen like a responsible adult. My mistake was trusting my daughter to get my back. While technically, she is very good at applying sunscreen, she approaches it as a form of abstract art, which while she has made some masterpieces, there is an element of pain involved for the canvases.)

The first graders also learned what the color red really means. Even after a week, my daughter likes to point out how red she is. (Glowing, not the healthy beauty commercial kind of glow, would be a good description.)

So, my daughter was basing her knowledge of knee wrapping on Miss Ann's in-depth medical knowledge. “Miss Ann didn't know enough to wear sunscreen and has been sunburned for a week. She's a putz.” didn't seem like a parent-ally responsible answer to my daughter's assertion about how to properly wrap her fatally wounded knee. (See, I went off on another tangent that had no real relation to the general theme, and still brought it back for a thematically correct wrap up.)

“Miss Ann can wrap your knee like that tomorrow. It's a good idea to wrap it straight for a little while to give it a break.” After years of suffering through being “taken care of” by the medical industry, I've learned how to limit the damage they cause.

“You still wrap it better than mommy.”

“Helloooooo. I'm a professional knee wrapper.” (Yeah, I have no idea where she gets her sarcasm from...)