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Bonnie Kearns is a nurse who works with the Canadian Red Cross and responds to disaster situations. She has completed over 30 missions.
“I was working in a field hospital in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, after an earthquake. In the cafeteria tent, an emergency nurse was wearing a rubber glove pulled over the top of his head. A piece of I.V. tubing was sticking out from under the glove, and the other end was in his mouth. I smiled. ‘I use it to get the kids to laugh,’ he said.
‘How?’ I asked.
He blew into the tube, and the fingers of the glove filled with air. He looked like a chicken. I had found a kindred spirit among the crowd.
During a nurses’ meeting, the charge nurse said she needed an assistant to attend meetings and cover on her days off.
At that point, I reached into my pocket and put on plastic glasses with a mustache. The nurse manager couldn’t see me from her angle.
I said loudly, ‘I expect you’ll want someone with dignity and decorum to do this job.’ Without turning around, she said, ‘Of course I do.’
At this point, the rest of the nurses laughed. The charge nurse turned around, looked me in the eye, and without a hint of a smile, she said, ‘Well done.’
The nurse, who had been wearing the chicken hat, leaned over and whispered, ‘I do believe that you and I will not make the short list for the assistant job.’
I smiled. He smiled. We both knew that was okay. We liked our roles. We were considered funny and fun—the ones that others wanted to work with.”
Submitted June 2024
