STITCH IN TIME 26 staples and a Jackson-Pratt drain were in my left elbow for 3 weeks.

We make assumptions about patients before we even meet them. We read their consents, check out their H&Ps and boom, we think we know everything. But we can be surprised.

"Oh, wow, I bet she fell over one of her 13 cats."
"Wonder if she's still in her right mind."
"She's overweight, and on metformin, metoprolol and an atorvastatin."
"Well there you go, hyperglycemia, hypertension, hyperlipidemia. Probably non-compliant, too."
"Look, she's still working."
"Really? What's she do?"
"Uh ... she's a nurse."
"You're kidding me." (An uncomfortable pause.) "How old did you say she was?"

When I actually meet the patient, I introduce myself, check her bracelet and ask about the procedure she's here for, but I'm thinking, "Wow, she doesn't look all that old or fat." Before I know it, I've already compared her to myself. Why do we do this? Just because we work with clinical profiles doesn't give us license to stereotype patients. How would I feel if the roles were reversed? I've been thinking about this lately, because recently they were.

When the nurse becomes the patient
I joke a lot about my lack of gracefulness and my klutzy near misses, but one night at the hospital I tripped over something in the OR. I tried to catch myself, but it was too late. My head hit the OR door and the rest of me landed on the floor. Fortunately, I was working with a great team that night. I was on a stretcher and in the emergency department before I realized that the blood on my scrubs was my own and not the last patient's.

I was treated and released. The next morning I visited a doc-in-the-box urgent care center to see if they could stitch up my left elbow, something we'd missed in the ER. I healed up, returned to work and finished my traveling contract at the hospital. Everything seemed fine.

By the time I made the trip home, though, it was clear there were some complications in my elbow. Within a week I was a name on the surgery schedule, a patient some nurse was reading a history on. I'd given them my age, my weight and everything else they could possibly need to know. What conclusions were they going to draw about me?

Looks can be deceiving
Surgery was routine. They knocked me out, sent me home the same day. I didn't ask who they'd imagined I'd be, based on my chart. Then there's recovery, which is even more trying. My daughter's got her eye on me: She's been treating me like I'm 90. My mother's had to come over, twice, to wash and dry my hair, because I can't lift my arm over my head with this barbaric torture apparatus of a splint on it. And I'm wondering if there's a red fall-risk bracelet in my future.

I can't work as a nurse until I'm done being a patient. With any luck, I should be out of this splint and on the road to my next contract at another hospital by the time you're reading this. But right now I'm pecking out these words with one hand. If nothing else, this pit stop has given me a moment between assignments to reflect on yet another lesson they don't teach you in nursing school (or didn't when I was there, anyway): Don't judge a book by its medical record, because karma is a boomerang.