The nurse who blings out her uniform

Most nurses say they wish to be known by the relationships they have with patients, not by their clothes. I’ve seen many nurses individualize their uniforms by wearing scrubs in ice-cream colours of raspberry, lemon and grape. There are those who wear lab coats decorated with teddy bears, angels or lollipops.

Later that day after the incident with the visitor passing by, I decided to ask some of the other nurses sitting in the lounge about clothes. “Do you remember Carrie? The one who tied her scrubs with a gold lamé belt and always wore a string of pearls? What a fashionista she was!”

“I remember her,” someone recalled with a chuckle. “That girl really knew how to pimp her uniform. She wore those white shoes with the kitten heels that went clickety-clack down the hall. You could always hear her coming. And what about her nail art? She had those long, curved acrylic ones and when she was dating that sailor she decorated them with nautical symbols! I always meant to ask how she managed to insert a catheter. Ouch!”*

*I didn’t get a chance to tell them about Justine’s famous T-shirts, like the one that read “Nurses Call the Shots” imprinted over a scary looking needle and syringe. Then there was a night she wore one that said “Institute for the Sexually Gifted” and handed out fake “Virgin Restorer Pills” to the older nurses, who laughed about it until the morning.

“Why do we even have to wear uniforms?” someone else asked. “We’re individuals, aren’t we?”

“In the old days,” reminisced Phyllis, a senior nurse, still going strong in our physically taxing work, “we worked hard for our caps and white uniforms, and when you put them on, you felt like a real nurse. It was like you were preparing for your role in a play. It meant something.”

Monica kept quiet, but I felt certain she had a strong opinion on the matter. I knew her ambitions. Even with a young daughter whom she supported on her own and after going through a messy divorce, Monica had returned to school for her master’s degree in management and was a stellar student. Finally, she spoke up. “Appearance matters. How would you feel if the pilot of the plane you’re on showed up wearing track pants and a T-shirt? What kind of impression would that make? And what about all the bling nurses are wearing these days? It doesn’t look professional and surely they know jewellery harbours bacteria that we can bring in or take home with us.” A chorus of dissent flared up, but Monica continued above the din. “Besides, the hospital has a dress code and we’re supposed to adhere to it.”

“That’s just a way for management to control us. It takes away our individuality!”

“What’s a nurse supposed to look like?”

Someone sarcastically offered the suggestion, “Try the ‘Naughty Nurse’ website. You can get some wild ideas there!”

“My kids want to dress up as nurses for Halloween. What can they wear to look like a nurse?”

“Have you seen that nurse in Dialysis who still wears a cap? What a dinosaur!”

“Did you see that doctor who came to see my patient this morning? He looked like a geeky high school student, no lab coat, no name tag, nothing. He went into my patient’s chart. ‘Who are you?’ I asked him. He looked like he’d walked in off the street. He could have been a visitor or a patient from the Psych ward!”

Nurses’ uniforms seem to be yet another issue in the ongoing debate about what and who a nurse is. Uniforms did have a way of obliterating individuality. They could turn people into a service to such a degree that ease of recognition or the speed with which they responded to a call bell became the measure of their worth.

Even I, who always preferred the generic, unisex and equalizing qualities of my green or blue scrubs, recently purchased a pair of shiny, candy-apple red shoes for work, as much for the vibrant colour as for the comfort. Is individual expression really such a threat? Can’t beauty and function coexist? What if nurses could find ways to use Beauty and Art as capably as they use Science?

Excerpted from The Making of a Nurse. Copyright © 2007 Tilda Shalof. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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