I went to the pinning ceremony for the class of 2009 at my almamater yesterday. Here is how it went for us. Last year.
Pomp, Circumstance and Candle Wax
Eyes bloodshot, temples throbbing, we all passed the final exam. Some more than others, but the magic equation is C=RN, so 54 students, threadbare and dog-eared, gathered in a walnut bar, mid-May, to celebrate the end of nursing school.
Now that it’s over, I’m experiencing a bit of culture shock. Suddenly the alarm clock does not go off and there is nothing left to study. There is no clinical rotation for which to prepare. There is a huge void, empty of syllabi, medications to look up, and lectures to endure. Mostly though, it is the faces; the tired, familiar faces that have helped each other push that boulder up a hill for two solid years, that have retreated and vanished as if there has been a bus crash.
So, for about a week we rekindled the fires and relationships of our former lives. My kids had grown. One was off at college. Several neighbors had moved away and others had moved in. There were two years’ worth of New Yorker magazines to pretend to read, two years’ worth of dust bunnies in the corners and then there was the matter of the woman who lives in my house on Rusty Hinge road, what was her name again?
It was a scary feeling. What were we supposed to do? Well, here’s what we were supposed to do: get jobs as nurses and study for our nursing boards but first, we had to sit through one last requirement of nursing school: the pinning ceremony.
Job schmob, don’t you know there is nursing shortage? Exam Schmexam, almost everybody passes that on the first try, but the pinning ceremony, what was that exactly?
It is built on generations of Nursing tradition, probably, like everything else, devised by Florence Nightingale – the Florence Henderson of the sitcom that was the prehensile Brady Bunch of nursing practice – it was she who sort of brought my new profession, which appears to have some genesis in the world’s oldest profession, out of the dark ages and into the 19th century. Most instructors, while mentioning her with respectful solemnity, are quick to point out that not all that much has changed in Nursing practices since old Flo transformed it into a science, which it truly is. But we were talking about the pinning ceremony and here’s what it is: sometime in the darkest, most insecure, shakiest part of the last semester of Nursing school, when you are convinced you are crazy and wonder why you had ever decided to pursue such a lofty ambition, a little man showed up at class and collects checks for our “pins.” These gold (toned) circular lapel jobbies are custom-enameled with the emblem of our Alma Mater with the graduate’s initials engraved (crookedly) on the back.
Assuming one gets to the end, it is this pin with which one is pinned at the pinning ceremony. It is cheaper and far less painful than a tattoo.
Other traditions: everyone wears white, which is great if you are a bride or suffer from chronic dandruff, but these days nurses don’t wear all white most of the time, we wear scrubs that have “Hannah Montana’s” image impregnated in the polyester. So there’s the next item on the “to do” list: buy white nursing outfits. Another part of the ceremony involves a lamp and open flame, which goes back once again to Florence’s tenure (having to do with her sobriquet, “the Lady with the Lamp”). My class voted to be cheap and went with candles, rather than shell out another 12 bucks a head for official imitation Crimean war style porcelain lamps. In any event, word got around that the Fire Marshall wasn’t too pleased. Fortunately for him, we were all almost nurses, and even though we were not much use when it comes to putting out burning buildings, we were all about tending to burn victims.
So, a week after the final exam, we all arrived at the place of the pinning, scrubbed and shiny. The women had had their hair done so as to render them unrecognizable and the men looked like ice cream vendors.
But as we all came together one last time, and we were rested and the hangovers were gone we realized the good news along with the bad: the good news, it was over at last, the bad news: it was over for us.
That’s when the waterworks started. Tears of joy at first then the gulping, shattering realization that we were all going our separate ways and that even though we promised not to stray too far, we’d already begun to drift apart.
They queued us up in the back hall and checked us for alphabetization and made sure we were all properly free of crumbs and lint. We pulsed with energy as the friends and family members we had all not seen much of for 24 months, assembled in their seats with bouquets, flash cameras and possibly a thousand restless, noisy kids. We marched down the aisle to the thunder of their applause and on to the stage, filled with carefully arranged chairs under the hot lights of the stage.
More than a century of tradition poured over the audience for the next hour or so, as we waited in our whites gleaming from the glow within and the lights without and finally from the slim candles we all held aloft while we mumbled our way through the “Nursing Pledge,” and then, one by one, our instructors pinned us. A final happy finish. A coup de grace, delivered by the very folks who for the past two years had held our futures in their hands, and we marched back down and through the aisle to the rhythmic foot stomps and claps and into the night where nothing bad could possibly happen on this day that took so long to arrive.
It’s summer now, for real. Waves of heat warp the sight line over the highway and we hold fresh résumés in our carefully washed hands to find out just how desperate the need is for new nurses.
Jobs are out there, hiding in the bushes, but before we are secure in our new careers, the boards must be taken and passed. The books wait, but not for long, in the silence and the long overdue sleep at last.
This might pinch a bit.
Eyes bloodshot, temples throbbing, we all passed the final exam. Some more than others, but the magic equation is C=RN, so 54 students, threadbare and dog-eared, gathered in a walnut bar, mid-May, to celebrate the end of nursing school.
Now that it’s over, I’m experiencing a bit of culture shock. Suddenly the alarm clock does not go off and there is nothing left to study. There is no clinical rotation for which to prepare. There is a huge void, empty of syllabi, medications to look up, and lectures to endure. Mostly though, it is the faces; the tired, familiar faces that have helped each other push that boulder up a hill for two solid years, that have retreated and vanished as if there has been a bus crash.
So, for about a week we rekindled the fires and relationships of our former lives. My kids had grown. One was off at college. Several neighbors had moved away and others had moved in. There were two years’ worth of New Yorker magazines to pretend to read, two years’ worth of dust bunnies in the corners and then there was the matter of the woman who lives in my house on Rusty Hinge road, what was her name again?
It was a scary feeling. What were we supposed to do? Well, here’s what we were supposed to do: get jobs as nurses and study for our nursing boards but first, we had to sit through one last requirement of nursing school: the pinning ceremony.
Job schmob, don’t you know there is nursing shortage? Exam Schmexam, almost everybody passes that on the first try, but the pinning ceremony, what was that exactly?
It is built on generations of Nursing tradition, probably, like everything else, devised by Florence Nightingale – the Florence Henderson of the sitcom that was the prehensile Brady Bunch of nursing practice – it was she who sort of brought my new profession, which appears to have some genesis in the world’s oldest profession, out of the dark ages and into the 19th century. Most instructors, while mentioning her with respectful solemnity, are quick to point out that not all that much has changed in Nursing practices since old Flo transformed it into a science, which it truly is. But we were talking about the pinning ceremony and here’s what it is: sometime in the darkest, most insecure, shakiest part of the last semester of Nursing school, when you are convinced you are crazy and wonder why you had ever decided to pursue such a lofty ambition, a little man showed up at class and collects checks for our “pins.” These gold (toned) circular lapel jobbies are custom-enameled with the emblem of our Alma Mater with the graduate’s initials engraved (crookedly) on the back.
Assuming one gets to the end, it is this pin with which one is pinned at the pinning ceremony. It is cheaper and far less painful than a tattoo.
Other traditions: everyone wears white, which is great if you are a bride or suffer from chronic dandruff, but these days nurses don’t wear all white most of the time, we wear scrubs that have “Hannah Montana’s” image impregnated in the polyester. So there’s the next item on the “to do” list: buy white nursing outfits. Another part of the ceremony involves a lamp and open flame, which goes back once again to Florence’s tenure (having to do with her sobriquet, “the Lady with the Lamp”). My class voted to be cheap and went with candles, rather than shell out another 12 bucks a head for official imitation Crimean war style porcelain lamps. In any event, word got around that the Fire Marshall wasn’t too pleased. Fortunately for him, we were all almost nurses, and even though we were not much use when it comes to putting out burning buildings, we were all about tending to burn victims.
So, a week after the final exam, we all arrived at the place of the pinning, scrubbed and shiny. The women had had their hair done so as to render them unrecognizable and the men looked like ice cream vendors.
But as we all came together one last time, and we were rested and the hangovers were gone we realized the good news along with the bad: the good news, it was over at last, the bad news: it was over for us.
That’s when the waterworks started. Tears of joy at first then the gulping, shattering realization that we were all going our separate ways and that even though we promised not to stray too far, we’d already begun to drift apart.
They queued us up in the back hall and checked us for alphabetization and made sure we were all properly free of crumbs and lint. We pulsed with energy as the friends and family members we had all not seen much of for 24 months, assembled in their seats with bouquets, flash cameras and possibly a thousand restless, noisy kids. We marched down the aisle to the thunder of their applause and on to the stage, filled with carefully arranged chairs under the hot lights of the stage.
More than a century of tradition poured over the audience for the next hour or so, as we waited in our whites gleaming from the glow within and the lights without and finally from the slim candles we all held aloft while we mumbled our way through the “Nursing Pledge,” and then, one by one, our instructors pinned us. A final happy finish. A coup de grace, delivered by the very folks who for the past two years had held our futures in their hands, and we marched back down and through the aisle to the rhythmic foot stomps and claps and into the night where nothing bad could possibly happen on this day that took so long to arrive.
It’s summer now, for real. Waves of heat warp the sight line over the highway and we hold fresh résumés in our carefully washed hands to find out just how desperate the need is for new nurses.
Jobs are out there, hiding in the bushes, but before we are secure in our new careers, the boards must be taken and passed. The books wait, but not for long, in the silence and the long overdue sleep at last.
This might pinch a bit.
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