Associate Degree Nursing . . .

In the fall of 1973, I started in the Associate Degree Nursing program at University of Bridgeport's Junior College of Connecticut. 

Did I want to be a nurse? 

Didn't really enter the consideration.  I didn't want to work.  I was elligible for the GI Bill.  I could go to school . . .

I had been a Hospital Corpsman in the Navy . . .

I was a Nursing Assistant in a Surgical Intensive Care Unit at the West Haven VA Hospital . . .

Nursing should be a breeze.  And it was.  In the entire program, the only thing I had to learn that I hadn't learned before was the one semester of OB/GYN.  There were over 100 people in my ADN program, and only 6 of us were guys, and we were all ex-military medic types.  I graduated cum laude in 1975. 

And I applied to Ringling Bros Barnum and Bailey Clown College.  I never heard from them.  But, knowing that no news is good news, I decided to go anyway.  I went to Florida and showed up at the RBB&B winter quarters on the day Clown College started.  I met Dick Brown, director of security.  It took him a while to figure out that I didn't belong there, and while he was figuring, I watched from the wings as Gale LaJoie entertained the new class.   This is Gale . . .

He was in a ring full of props.  I remember a gorilla head and a step ladder and a wine bottle.  I don't remember what he did with them, but I do remember he made me laugh.

But all too soon, Dick Brown got me sorted out and then he got me escorted out . . .

So close . . .

I stayed in Florida, and got a job as charge nurse on a 40 bed psychiatry ward in Jacksonville.

Then Nursing got difficult.  Actually, it was the day my license came in the mail that Nursing got difficult.  Somehow, I instinctively knew that I was never going to know as much about how to do the job I had as I thought a person who had that job ought to know.  I had been a really good nursing assistant.  Being a nurse, being in charge, however, was a whole different story.  I was never comfortable at work again.  There was a rule of thirds in psychiatry then- no matter what you did to or for psych patients, one third got worse, one third showed no change, and one third got better. 

It was a very strange year.  I got punched on a regular basis.  I got threatened on a regular basis.  I administered a lot of valium, and haldol, and thorazine.  And it rained almost every afternoon right at the time I would be leaving the building to go home, and I never learned to not leave my umbrella in the car . . .