Talking at cross-purposes
Sep. 28th, 2012 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firefly124So, to preface this, I should note that I made it a point to find some kind of rainbow-themed earrings that meet the dress code where I work. Stunningly difficult, as most seem to be dangly-type earrings. I even have a set of those, but I don't need a dress code to tell me how monumentally stupid it would be to give some of my residents dangly earrings to grab at. I found a pair that work, and they match with two of my scrub sets: one of which has some random "brush strokes" of various colors over white, the other of which has multicolor hearts on it. So I try to arrange my pile o'scrubs such that I wear one of those sets one week and the other the next.
The reason for this is partly because of the series of experiences that nudged me in the direction of public health nursing with a focus on LGBT elders. Long-term care is super heteronormative, even in places that pride themselves on being very progressive and welcoming, and whoever the 2-3 residents likely to identify as some flavor of LGBT are on my floor of 30, I want to send at least that subtle message that they're not alone and there is someone safe to talk to if they need to. (Actually, I find that most of the nurses at Communications Clusterfuckery Are Us are probably very safe to open up to, almost in inverse proportion to how I felt about the nursing staff at the Soul-Sucking Vortex of Doom. It's still a very heteronormative environment.)
For the most part, this goes unremarked, except for the odd, "How colorful!" comment. And then this conversation happened:
Resident: Oh, what lovely earrings. Are you a rainbow girl?
Me: Um, that's not how I would typically put it, but I suppose so.
Resident: Really? Oh, that's lovely! What assembly?
Me: We are definitely having two completely different conversations here.
This led, actually, to a very lovely conversation about her experiences with the Rainbow Girls, a group by the Masons for girls, similar so far as I can tell to Girl Scouts. When the conversation (which took all of about 10 minutes) ended, she smiled and said that even if I wasn't a real Rainbow Girl, it was very nice to be able to relive some of those memories with someone and that she felt much better about her evening having had that conversation.
What I find particularly neat about this is that, while this wasn't precisely what I had in mind, the result was still pretty much the one I was going for. "Here is someone you can talk to." Made my day as well.
The reason for this is partly because of the series of experiences that nudged me in the direction of public health nursing with a focus on LGBT elders. Long-term care is super heteronormative, even in places that pride themselves on being very progressive and welcoming, and whoever the 2-3 residents likely to identify as some flavor of LGBT are on my floor of 30, I want to send at least that subtle message that they're not alone and there is someone safe to talk to if they need to. (Actually, I find that most of the nurses at Communications Clusterfuckery Are Us are probably very safe to open up to, almost in inverse proportion to how I felt about the nursing staff at the Soul-Sucking Vortex of Doom. It's still a very heteronormative environment.)
For the most part, this goes unremarked, except for the odd, "How colorful!" comment. And then this conversation happened:
Resident: Oh, what lovely earrings. Are you a rainbow girl?
Me: Um, that's not how I would typically put it, but I suppose so.
Resident: Really? Oh, that's lovely! What assembly?
Me: We are definitely having two completely different conversations here.
This led, actually, to a very lovely conversation about her experiences with the Rainbow Girls, a group by the Masons for girls, similar so far as I can tell to Girl Scouts. When the conversation (which took all of about 10 minutes) ended, she smiled and said that even if I wasn't a real Rainbow Girl, it was very nice to be able to relive some of those memories with someone and that she felt much better about her evening having had that conversation.
What I find particularly neat about this is that, while this wasn't precisely what I had in mind, the result was still pretty much the one I was going for. "Here is someone you can talk to." Made my day as well.
