Nurse Google

Yesss, I'm still in nursing school. Noooo, I'm not positive I want to be a nurse when I grow up. Buuuuut, no one will pay me for party planning. Soooo, I get to tell stories like this.

I started this year in a mental health rotation. Having grown up in my family, I learned to love me some crazy. Got anxiety and depression? Yay! How about childhood trauma? Woo hoo! Can I get some substance abuse? Oh yeah. Violence as common as family reunions? That's what I call a party.

To be fair, I think I love me some crazy because I've always just been on the periphery of it. Sure, I've had to pack my grandma's stilettos in a garbage bag so she could flee a fever-ravaged psycho killer, but my family family -- my parents and my sisters -- was at its worst Roseanne-caliber crazy. We weren't the Huxtables, but we weren't the Bundys either.

For me, crazy people are as fun as a good episode of Cops. Or Intervention. Or Hoarders. Or Bad Girls Club. Maybe it's time to tone down the TV watching...

I think my appreciation for crazy people comes from a place of compassion more than a need for entertainment at other people's expense. Although, come on, if someone ever told you they used to hang out with Chuck Norris and were waiting to collect their fortune from Crime Stoppers, could you resist being entertained by the story they were spinning? Even television isn't that good.

My first day on the unit, I was mostly curious, but I was also a little bit afraid. I know my mood disorders, am pretty good with my personality disorders, and am basically an expert with substance abuse, but I had never been around schizophrenia more than as a passerby on a street corner. I had never had to interact with someone whose brain was really, truly betraying them, making them believe things as fully as I believe my perception of the world. To probe those minds even a little bit was completely fascinating sprinkled with a little bit of terrifying. You see, they're not stupid. Their intellect is intact, moreso than some people I go to school with. Some of the things they said, some of their insights, some of their feelings about strangers, while they were completely bizarre at first, they sort of had a psychic transcendence about them after a double-take.

My most memorable account, however, was just plain crazy.

My class was lined up against a wall and a guy walked past us and locked his eyes on mine in such a way that I needed a shower. I tend to think I imagine things, so it wasn't until a fellow student said to me, "I think you just got eye-raped," that I gave that feeling some credence. Not wanting to provoke him, I sort of looked away, then looked back to prove I wasn't afraid of eye contact, and then looked away again. That's called non-verbal communication. Dogs do it, too.

He made another round, and this time he asked my name. I answered him, and then he explained that he had dated two other girls with my name before. Apparently, one had a smell he liked and the other didn't. And then he asked me the weirdest question I've ever been asked in my life.

"Can I smell you?"

How exactly are you not supposed to find that hilarious?