Note to self

To be added to the list of things they don't mention in training: pay attention to the notes. Teachers use children like messenger pigeons, and they nearly always come bearing something about their supposed condition on paper. At first I thought they were just hall passes, but now I learned they can have very useful information on the paper, and the kids don't always offer it upon entrance. Last week I had a kid come in complaining of being stung by a bee. Sure enough, his finger was quite swollen. I started to panic: what if he was allergic, what if he's one of those kids that has an allergy but the parent is just too "busy" to bring an epi-pen in, what the heck do you do for bee stings anyway, who thinks I'm any sort of capable nurse?! I started with ice while I looked up his emergency contact information. The kid wanted to leave with the ice pack but I insisted he stay in my office while I waited for him to go into anaphylactic shock and keel over and die. After 15 minutes, I let him go and waited the rest of the day for the phone to ring and have it be his teacher saying he was dead. (When you're the new girl, you can't help but let your imagination go wild and work in sometimes paralyzing fear that the worst will most certainly happen.) At the end of the day I was cleaning off all the notes and miscellaneous scraps of paper off my desk and found the one the bee sting kid came in with: "Billy was stung by a bee yesterday. Still hurting him."

I would not have needed to go through my entire day waiting for a kid to die if I'd just read the note. Now I'm training the kids to give me the note to read before I even start talking to them.