I’ll skip the input section this time and just leave you with an extended rationale for some pieces that are important to me.
OUTPUT
This month I finished a three year project, it was very satisfying. Throughout my nursing degree we were sent out on 6 placements and each of them were pretty wild, I did an artwork for each. This was pure self indulgence, something for me to alone look back on and appreciate. The idea is in part from the excellent HBO series “Oz” there’s a poet in the penitentiary who doesn’t write anything down, his performances are inspired from these multi-narrative drawings he does first. I love that idea. Here’s the art and some of the details crammed into each one:
THE OBSTACLE IS THE WAY
This was my first placement and a trial by fire. Uni changed my location at the last minute and there wasn’t even space for accommodation at the backpackers. I ended up paying just under $3k for 3 weeks in an airbnb underneath a family’s living space. It was hell, hardly slept while I was there cos there were rats in the walls, and the family threatened to cut off my internet as I was using too much while completing my pharmacology study and exam. At the end of my first week I came out at the end of a very long shift and found my motorbike in pieces in the car park. Some poor little old lady coming for dialysis absolutely destroyed it thinking she’d park in the motorbike parking. I wouldn’t be able to complete the placement without transport so I was in trouble. My partner drove two hours to come and rescue me from dealing with apathetic cops and insurance. We went out for pancakes the next morning and I opened up gumtree and found my dream car for sale 15mins away (20 year old corolla) and we went and bought it within the hour. This is on top of it being my introduction to what is fundamentally a broken system with nursing in NSW. I lost my entire savings for the the degree, about $30k ($3k accom + $17k bike + $10k car) and what felt like part of my sanity in the first week, but also realised I’m pretty capable.
APATHY AS A TOOL NOT A WEAPON
My next placement was a collection of my worst student clinical experiences. This was the local hospital so at least I could come home and cry in my own bed. I purposefully did this one in black and grey similarly to the rationale for why Picasso did Guernica in black and grey, as a sign of immediacy reporting on horrific times as well as digging into the truth behind the picture, no hiding in a colourful facade. In this one you can find a prominent skull, I had two patients die in messy situations that should have been better handled by the hospital. I got to take part in care after death and saw the part of the mortuary that the public shouldn’t ever see. There’s the cheeky old bloke with his bum poking out. I turned around one day and saw my patient with dementia stalking off into the forest, he’d successfully navigated a locked door and fire stairs while usually he couldn’t make it to the toilet. There’s pills, beeping infusion pumps, too many beds (10 for one nurse during a MET call) a syringe, covid masks, THE KEYS, scaffolding and construction work that means your one break is full of power tools. There’s the boom gates which forced student nurses (working for free) to pay for parking each day. And the cute little rabbit that would greet me after a long arvo shift walking back to the car. The worst part about this placement was the apathy management had towards the conditions of the ward nurses, and in turn the apathy those poor understaffed, overworked nurses were forced to employ towards the patients. Student nurses just do not fit into those broken situations.
DO YOUR TIME BEFORE IT DOES YOU
Off to prison next. I think I got the most out of this one, maybe not clinical skills but perspective and also nursing heroes to look up to. Personally I am very much against the prison system, it doesn’t help it just perpetuates a social gradient that punishes poor people. I liked this placement because in a public system the nurses are visitors to the facility and I can still hold that viewpoint and get to work helping some of the most vulnerable people. I didn’t know this but Australian prisons also have inmates produce commercial products that big brands profit from but don’t advertise this fact. This one made Fantastic Furniture products (see the chair in the art), others make products for Virgin Australia, and this is very much a form of modern slavery given the conditions and lack of pay. It means there’s an economic incentive for these people to remain incarcerated. This was a wild time in the region as there were raging bushfires close by that were choking the sky with smoke, charcoal leaves were raining down into the prison yards and barbed wire coils ( see the yellow hazed clouds in the art). At one point the power failed and the backup generators wouldn’t engage so all the nurses had to retreat to a safe room and wait for a couple of hours until power came back. At the time there was a trial for the dry blood spot program (see the syringes and blood drops) which was a rapid way of detecting hep C and lining up treatment. Apparently 80% of all hep C in Australia originates from sharing needles or fluids in prison. My favourite nurse was so patient, understanding, compassionate towards the inmates but also stood her ground against the prison security being unnecessarily cruel. She’s in the artwork dolling out the daily methadone, she has 6 eyes in this to keep a close watch on who is diverting their meds. Other elements that can be seen in this artwork are the rows of screens keeping eyes on everything, the textured concrete and sharp angles everywhere, the mechanical locks (lucky this was the case when the power failed) and finally the pills. The way the medication was done here was that every inmate with meds just had everything popped out into a little snaplock baggie given to them usually daily with no oversight at the time as to whether they’d taken them, and it was all a paper based system. There was one doctor in particular that only one nurse could interpret/translate what their scratchings meant.
THE REALITY OF AN IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE
Another location away from home, but this time I secured a caravan out on a property for $80 a week, best accommodation of the whole degree. The actual placement was in a close observation unit and I got to see how different breathing apparatus worked and some pretty complex comorbidities, but it wasn’t always busy. So I opted to spend as much time as I could on the local needle and syringe program, I think it was about now that I was pretty certain I wanted to go down the mental health / drug and alcohol pathway in my future career. I went out to locations to do kit drops (see the syringes and spoons) in burnt out abandoned buildings that the ambulances wouldn’t come to without a police escort. The town has a pretty dark and complex history. While doing a pop up out reach stall for people people living rough me and another student fell in love with this beautiful Australian kelpie and were chatting to its owners for a couple of hours. While this was all happening a helicopter was circling the city centre, we didn’t know why until we saw the news afterwards. Turns out we were hanging out with two people involved in a highway shooting spree who were on the run, we recognised our favourite dog in the helicopter footage of the arrest. The title of this piece refers to what we later found out, their friend was taken by a psychotic break and was shooting at strangers while driving down the highway, they shot and killed their mate so that he couldn’t hurt anyone else.
TRUST THE PROCESS
My next placement was in the Emergency Department and Luckily I got to come back and stay in my favourite caravan again. This was a great placement and I learnt a lot but it was also the first placement where I was targeted by bullying which everyone was telling me is synonymous with nursing. A lot of the ED patients coming in were mental health patients or coming off drugs and alcohol and required a heavy security presence, no joke the security guards they put on regularly were identical twins. Imagine thinking you were over the worst of it and then suddenly you were legitimately seeing double. The thing I learnt about ED which turned me off it is that everyone is just a process, predominantly cardiac, abdominal blockage, infection, or substances. You don’t actually get to spend much time with patients as people, treat em and yeet em. Some hidden images in the art include my broken car door doubling as a crashing cardiac monitor; my caravan doubling as myocardial components; and a stingray as I got to treat someone who copped the barb on their foot. The treatment was just putting their foot in water as hot as they could stand; monitoring them; and making sure there was no barb left in there.
NOTHING REALLY MATTERS UNLESS YOU WANT IT TO
My last placement was my choice, across state lines and in a mental health acute facility. Also in black and grey due to how messed up the surrounding factors of the placement were. The placement itself was great, felt safe supported and learnt a lot in a field I’m interested in. For context by this time I was already working as an assistant in nursing in a local mental health facility that was much more acute and severely understaffed. Some of the elements in the art include the light rail that I caught to the hospital everyday, I loved the combo of walking and public transport, I got to look at the stars on the walk home and saved $14 a day on parking. There’s a film projector representing my treat to myself, at the end of each week I’d take myself to the local cinema and watch a new release horror movie, the laptop doubles as a cinema with seating. There’s a lady with binoculars, this is the infamous student coordinator, she made life difficult for everyone. She would stay late and post up near the train station and penalise anyone who was leaving before 9:30pm regardless whether you had been dismissed by your ward. She was unnecessarily confrontational, and had students in tears as she wielded her power and literally cancelled placements meaning another 6-12 months of uni. The big drama of this placement is represented by the abstract corded phone with the coins flowing from one end and the timepiece at the other. Centrelink had decided to cut off my Austudy payments right when I needed them most staying interstate at an airbnb for 6 weeks working for free. They were building a case against me (claimed they weren’t) and kept needing more and more information as the pdfs I was uploading through their systems kept losing info or having errors, their phone app was under maintenance etc. So I had to give up my one 20min break most days to fight with them on the phone about which date I had uploaded which document and to whom I had discussed the issues with previously. It was hell, and despite being reassured otherwise, I was rewarded for my efforts with a $13k fine. That’s small change to some but for a student who’s already broke about to go into one of the most underpaid professions it’s hard to see how you’d be able to recover. But also I am a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust, riding a rock, hurtling through space. Nothing really matters.