Top 10 nurse humor articles of 2010

If you’re a nurse, you need to find time to laugh—preferably at something funny. Here at Scrubs, we try to give you a giggle or two every week. Here are our 10 most popular humor pieces of 2010.

1. Never Have I Ever. Have you ever played Never Have I Ever? It’s a game that can make you laugh like you’ve never laughed before…it can produce a chorus of “me too!”…or it can provide a few moments of embarrassment (or all of the above!). And if there ever were a profession where this particular game  could make people squirm, it’s likely nursing. For example, here’s one your comments: “I have given the patient a different name for myself…after his asking and receiving the correct name more than 50 times.”

2. You Tawkin’ Slang? Every profession has its secret language and its slang. Some nurses may believe they’ll never use nursing slang, but sooner or later, we all succumb. Pretty much everyone has heard of “frequent fliers”—patients who keep coming back—but have you ever heard of a “jack-in-the-box”? Apparently, it’s a patient who can’t stand or walk, yet insists on trying!

3. Take This Job and… Remember the airline attendant who swore at a passenger and then activated the emergency chute to leave the plane? That was one heck of a way to quit a job. Nurses don’t have emergency chutes to pull, but they can be pretty creative when coming up with unique ways to tell the boss they’re leaving.

4. Murphy Must Have Been a Nurse. Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. That sort of describes many shifts—no matter where, no matter when. Some of the more common scenarios:

• The more minor the injury, the more angry that person is for having to wait. Meanwhile, the little old guy with crushing chest pain says, “Oh, it’s okay, I’ve waited this long already….”
• The lift always breaks down when the 400-pound patient needs to be transferred from one bed to another.
• You’ve been working all day long without even a coffee break, but the moment you sit down, the supervisor walks around the corner and sees you doing nothing.

5. If Hospital Walls Could Talk. If hospital walls could talk, what stories they would tell! Well, since the walls can’t talk, the nurses can do it instead, and some of the stories they share are just too funny.

6. The Perfect Hospital. The perfect hospital? One without visitors. Okay, we know that we can’t (or shouldn’t!) generalize, and there are some perfectly nice, sane and rational people out in the world. So, why is it that none of them—just their irrational cousins—come to visit the patients? We have visitors who bring food and eat in front of patients who are NPO, those who fill a room with more family members than there are players on a baseball team, and we can’t forget the ones who sit at the patient’s bedside and ring the bell so they (the visitors) can ask for a glass of water or a tissue. Ah, life as a servant—er, nurse.

7. Photo Captions: Much Hilarity. There are few things funnier than what nurses can come up with to title various photos. From the innocent snicker to the gut-wrenching (and maybe X-rated) guffaw, you can count on Scrubs magazine readers to come through every time.

8. “Nothing Good Is Ever Heard Through Eavesdropping.” Mom may have been right if she told you that listening to other people’s conversations was rude and a good way to hear something about yourself that maybe you’d rather not have heard. But listening to conversations at the nursing station is a great way to get free entertainment.

9. CNAs, Unsung Heroes of the Nursing Staff. As part of the nursing staff, CNAs play a vital role in patient care. We know that. And, like LPNs and RNs, they also have their own brand of humor, including a list of ways to know you’re a CNA.

10. Our Pets, Our Loves, Our Nurses? We know about pets who can help monitor people with diabetes and even some that can sense seizure activity, so is it a stretch to think that they could become good nurses, too? Check out this video of a dog determined not to let someone into the bathroom.

Do you have any favorites you would like to see again?