School Nurse is BACK! Fun With Beeps: The Hearing Test

Yes, it's another Note from the Frontline of Nursing.
You remember those days when you'd be sitting in Math class and Mrs. Peterson had that sullen look on her face because class was being disrupted. It was, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it. One by one children came in and out swapping for the next alphabetical last name to get a ten minute vacation from those agonizing decimal points.
It was time for the school nurse to check your hearing.
Admit it, you got a non-innocent FAIL look on your face and said, "I thought I heard a beep in my right ear that time, but I'm not sure." All in the name of killing a few more moments of Math.
I did it, too.
Until I was the one on the other side of the machine.
Enter the 1963 Hear-o-Matic Deluxe. I'm fairly certain that our department hadn't upgraded the things since Pete Best was still with the Beatles.

The golden days of hearing tests. This is a typewriter. The little boy raises his hand when Nursey gets to the end of a sentence and the typewriter goes "ding!"

I took a cleaning wipe to the machine and wiped the grime of a million kids from it. Eww.

I calibrated the bulky Hear-o-Matic. We measured children at 250 to 5000 Hertz. Not the rental cars, but a highly technical audio thingy that has to do with measuring the conduction of sound wave thingies your hearing thingy. Trust me on this.
The problem was, when I set it at the standard guidelines, the wires to the headphones (can I just remind you that the headphones are eeewwww after they clamp onto a thousand heads?) got kind of worn and wouldn't transmit the beeps at the right pitch (which is the Hertz thingy.)

What's this mean for you, little student?  Well, it means you will fail your hearing test, and I will have to send your mother a letter saying you can't hear shit, and she will freak out and the next day my phone will ring from 800 mothers and a few angry fathers who will demand to know which McNursing School I went to.

And this is how he's going to look again in a month when he gets the next letter that Norbert's BMI is 26 and he's clinically obese. Parents *love* that letter!

We don't want that.
So I called my boss and told her that the machine really wasn't working well and I couldn't hear the beep at 250 and 500 Hertz thingies.
"Easy fix!" she said. "Just turn the volume all the way up!"
Well. OK. But as far as I can tell, that kinda defeats the purpose of standardizing the Hertz and decibal levels for all the children.  
Not that it mattered.
Not at all.

As you well remember, these tests included a little jaunt to somewhere quiet - usually the library. Well, I packed up my Samsonite looking case and trekked off to the library, which was the quietest area, but still not so quiet.
You see, it was a lovely Spring day, and to get some fresh air, windows and doors were propped open.
But I gave it my all.
By the 3rd student I saw the massive failure.
"You know how it works? You raise your hand each time you hear the beep. Right hand for right ear, left for left."
Agreed.
She raised her right hand. I lifted the headphone from her ear.
I said, "But I haven't even sent a signal. You at least have to wait for me to start the test before you start faking it."
Then I heard a beep. She said, "That was the beep. Don't you hear that?" She took the headphones out of my hand and clamped them to her skull again, listening for the beep.
And another, and another.
And she kept raising her damn hand.
A truck was backing up outside, beeping.
Beep=Beep=Beep=Beep

Oh, Mr. Trucker, How many children have you helped pass their hearing screenings?

And I packed my things up and went back to the clinic where there were much easier issues to deal with. Like a sudden outbreak of fevers in Mrs. Johnson's English Class That Is Having An Exam.

School Nurse Curse

So you think a school nurse just kisses boo-boos. Clamps the hearing test machine on the kids' heads once a year and presses the beep button. Maybe takes a temperature now and then. Essentially a “cush” job, right?

Indulge me. Let me tell you a few stories as a school nurse and why I will never, ever do it again.

Get your hot water going, because you’re going to want to take a bath when we’re done.

 Let’s start with little “Jessica” age 5.

I was assigned an elementary school in a decent neighborhood and was in the clinic when a teacher brought Jessica inside.  She was crying, hard, the kind of crying where they have the long strings of snot and get choked up. 

“She ran into a post!” cried the teacher, and indeed an enormous egg shaped alien was sprouting from her forehead.

I brought little Jessica to the cot, and called for some ice. After checking her pupils and neurological checks, it was time to call the parents.

Contact number one disconnected.

Contact number two disconnected.

Emergency contact three didn’t speak English.

I spoke enough of her language to let her know we needed the parents to come for Jessica, and then returned to the girl. She was still so hysterical that she couldn’t hold the ice to her head.

I sat with her doing all the nursey things, holding the ice to her head, reassuring her with, “You’re ok,” and “Your parents are coming, don’t worry.”

I tipped my head to her head, cradling her and saying little things to make her laugh, and get her mind off her headache.  We stayed this way a good hour, rocking and so forth. I was wondering where the parents were and I sat back from Jessica to tell her that I was going to call again.  My hair band had come undone, and I swept my long hair out of my eyes, leaned back and….

My

heart

stopped.

Nope, nothing there.

Hundreds. There were hundreds. Her head was so infested with lice I almost thought they had to be some other bug. I never knew they could get that big. Sorta like goldfish? I guess if you just keep feeding them they grow as big as they want?

 Really? Who thought this was an appropiate game?

In the nurses’ station we always had a super fine-tooth comb and magnifying glass to look for cooties. You could take a fly swatter to these things.  And here I was, all along, head-to-head comforting little Jess for her freaking bump.

 Well, inside I was screaming. I very nearly shoved her off my lap and onto the carpet in panic. But I contained myself and gently slip her off while I mouthed the words “LICE, YOU CHECK!” to a health tech in the office.

Okay, story break for a minute.  

This health tech was a child of the 70’s and her mother had a thing for Sonny and Cher. To that end her mother wanted to name her “Chastity,” after You Know Who.  Except for some reason her mother missed a “T” and ended up naming her “Chasity.” To avoid the constant explanations of why her name is Chasity, she goes by “Chas.”

IMAGE: NOT this one.

Now let’s put it all together.

She thought that when I silently mouthed the words “LICE, YOU CHECK!” that I was saying, “LIKE YOU, CHAS!” and she looked at me like I had just spit in her cornflakes.

 So I got up, and right then the Daddy came in, carrying a little baby. All crawling with bugs.

 As for me, I went immediately to CVS and bought bug shampoo. I stripped outside my door because I didn’t want to bring in ANYTHING I was wearing at the school. It didn’t matter to me who saw.

I never saw any cooties, but I didn’t care. The instructions said leave it on for 10 minutes, I left it on for 30.  There was a hotline so I called it.

“Do you think any got on me?” I asked.

The man answered, “Well, head to head transmission *is* the most common way to get them.

“But I didn’t SEE any. Could I still have gotten them?” I asked.

“It’s possible. You’ll know in 10 days when eggs hatch!” he said, sort of excited, like they were his babies.

“What?! I don’t want eggs! I don’t want to wait 10 days! I need answers!”

I was starting to feel like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men when he says to Col. Jessup “I want the truth!”

And Col. Jessup says, “You can’t handle the truth!”

(about cooties in your hair)

 Plus the pesticide fumes were hurting my eyes. I was talking to him with the stuff in my hair.

So we hung up and I started combing through, or rather combing out my hair. As it fell in clumps on the floor.

Never caught any bugs, thank goodness.  But wait til I tell you about being a nurse at the beach. Remember the old saying about how urine helps jellyfish stings? Well…