Control ya face moments

I know you know those moments that I am talking about.

My nursing school buddies and I think we coined the phrase “control ya face” but we really didn’t. It’s just funnier to feel like we did. The longer I stay in the nursing profession, the funnier it gets. One day I may call my friend and say something like, “I had the most amazing control ya face moment today, ” and she will respond with, “did you do it? control ya face,” and I’ll respond with a great big NO and then we fall into fits of laughter. My fellow nurses know what I mean when I say that sometimes these moments are quite extreme.

These moments are not only found when I have scrubs on, but they can be found during real life too. I’d like to describe two of them for you that have all happened around me within the past week that all have very different emotions surrounding them.

The first one came to me as a surprise. For those of you who follow me, you know that I am a nurse. Year of the Nurse is what they call 2020 since it marks the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. They didn’t say that this would be the same year that a pandemic would fall into our laps. Thankfully, New York’s numbers are down. So here I am going to my first outdoor group workout, and I am giddy as a clam with my towel, yoga mat and a smile. The woman two mats down from me basically stated as loud as she could, “Well, I don’t believe the pandemic is real anyway.” I took a breath and instead of flying my arms in the air like a baboon, screeching in a frustrated manner, I told myself to just enjoy my class. Believe it or not, that actually worked! However, I did not succeed at this particular “control ya face” moment.

The second one happened at work. I am training someone right now and we were headed to pick up a child with a questionable respiratory assessment. On the ambulance, we made a plan based on multiple anomalies. We walked into the outside hospital, our hearts beating rapidly and saw our patient asleep on the bed. We wake him up, afraid to see what his breathing status might be, and he opens his eyes and looks up at two nurses, a respiratory therapist, a paramedic and EMS worker and says, “Hi!” We all took a huge breath of relief. That was a moment that none of us controlled our faces through!

One positive to wearing masks all the time is that those “control ya face” moments can be easily hidden!