Says Blatchford, First We Shoot All The Nurses

I actually did a double take, and my jaw dropped, slightly when I read this:

It’s why, where I used to think that before I got really old I’d get me a gun so I could shoot myself, I now wonder if I won’t instead turn the weapon on some officious hospital executive, wanker bureaucrat or brute of a nurse.

Yes, it’s Christie Blatchford in her latest National Post column, taking her Canadian-health-care-is-the-Fifth-Horseman-of-the-Apocalypse shtick to new heights. It’s pretty tiresome, and a bit tasteless, given the high rates of violence nurses experience.

One also gets impression that Blatchford’s knowledge and experience of nurses and nursing runs in a straight line from Cherry Ames, Student Nurse to Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery. Funny how a self-proclaimed straight-shooting iconoclast ends up reinforcing predictable cultural stereotypes.

But let’s assume Blatchford’s hostility and ignorance isn’t willful. Maybe she really knows squat about nursing. I am willing to have her shadow me for a day in my emerg, under two conditions: first, she works the entire 12 hour shift, and second, she sits when I sit. Seriously, Christie, email me.