Getting over the 90s

Last night, coming home from school around 9:30pm and hoping to catch the last bit of the Phillies/Yankees game, I drove past the elementary school a few blocks from my house. The neighborhood had that just-dark feel to it, like even though the sky was black, I could swear I detected a faint light to it.

The scoreboard on the ball field was lit up, a numerological beacon. I kept thinking that it must be some kind of sign, those numbers. But what? I like the idea of signs, that someone much larger than us has something to say, directly, and so you suddenly feel spotlit and special. God says, Hey you. Listen. But for the life of me, despite my relatively new-found baseball fandom, I could not figure out what 0-5-8, 0-0-2 would mean for me. So maybe God was just saying, Hey you. Or, vastly more likely, maybe someone simply forgot to turn it off post-game.
Hah.

It gave me this great pleasure to see it, though. Inexplicably. Lit up numbers in a dark field on a dark night.

Guess what?

I've been suddenly infused with a burst of confidence. I'm really tired of doubting myself. Doubting oneself is like so 1990's or something. I'm going to make a good nurse. Maybe even a great one. Maybe even a fucking great one.

Maybe when I enter patient's rooms and do my stuff and then leave, people will look at each other and say, "Who was that woman? That is one damn good nurse."

Okay, now I'm getting crazily ahead of myself. Because if you know anything about me, I'm a first-class waffler. I know the doubt will creep in again, when I'll start worrying about making mistakes or having to treat someone high on PCP. Or being faced with a spinal surgery. There is something about the spinal column that makes me feel faint. I actually feel a little queasy right now, just pondering it.

Whenever I visualize myself as a nurse, I always place myself right in the middle of something hard. I never visualize myself sitting on a stool in a fluorescent-lit room asking a teenager about their acne patterns. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I wonder why my fragile mind goes to hospice care or oncology or, like most recently, the burn unit. I even ordered a book on burn unit work.

I mean, really.

Sometimes I also visualize Ricky Gervais getting right in my face and saying, "Oh come off it!"

(This is what I picture. Ricky as David Brent looking at me just like this. Except without that corporate seminar guy looking over his shoulder.)

There has to be a happy medium. Maybe I could handle those things. Maybe I couldn't. Most likely I couldn't. Oh boy, there's that self-doubt again. Circa 1996.

I wish the light on the scoreboard spelled something out for me. Like, Kelly, you'd make a damn good cardiology nurse. Or, because there isn't enough room for all that: try some heart.

Though because the scoreboard is only numbers, the best it could probably do in terms of messages is 80085. Which would be BOOBS.