I couldn't be a Primary School Nurse
The other week I had First Aid Training. It had somehow been three years since I last did it (I guess First Aid certificate validity dates don't extend because of pandemics), but this time it felt much more rewarding and helpful.
The last time I did it it was in a training room of a cinema in Wembley, where I was much more concerned about the amount of coffee I just drank, what food is good around here (Handmade Burger Co by the way, though the service leaves much to be desired), and will my mind ever get rid of the First Aid episode of The Office US.
It never will.
This time, however, felt much more complete. It was run by the British Red Cross, it was taken by a whole range of people and backgrounds (including one kid that clearly had to do it in the effort to get a job), and it was here I realised that I learnt more first aid stuff during Primary School than I did actually at the previous First Aid Training. This got me thinking...
I couldn't be a Primary School Nurse.
Do...they even exist? Hell, even my High School didn't have a nurse, something else Harry Potter books clearly mis-sold to me. The only nurses we had passing through were ones showing us how gross STIs can be, as if that was the deterrent for me getting laid in high school and not the fact I enjoyed Monty Python and Whose Line Is It Anyway? in the mid-2000s.
If Primary School Nurses do exist, I couldn't find myself being one of those. I feel I am in a state of being both over and under-qualified for that job. First Aid At Work certificates don't exactly have enough application on the playground. Unless playgrounds are still like the horror movies that were 80s PSAs, I think I can get by. 80s and 90s safety PSAs over-sold a lot of dangers we thought we were gonna face. Just like how quicksand was a thing, right? Too many stories made us think we'd come across quicksand the moment we step outside and that we'd be gonners. How wrong we were.
Back in Primary School I felt it was rare you'd get anything more than cuts, bumps, bruises on the playground. When the football got way too heated or someone's temper went full-Donald Duck and you've got an adorable fight on your hands. Tiny humans thinking they're Connor McGregor are hilarious. I know when I was in Primary School the worst I got was busted up legs scraping across the ground playing footy. Holes in my school trousers making good use of that random square of fabric they give you with those trousers because they know your kid is gonna put a hole in them.
Conversely, the worst I saw in Primary School is the traumatising sight of why you shouldn't stand on those Victorian-Era fences with the spikes on top. If you've seen Hot Fuzz, you can guess what the slightly-less extreme version I saw was.
There was not a nurse in my Primary School, further fuelling my conspiracy theory that they don't exist, but regardless of them being real or not, we all know the true reason why I could not be one and why if anything, their existence is futile.
The only way to heal a Primary School kid of any malady is this: The wet paper towel.
You don't need to have a First Aid Certificate or be a literal Doctor to administer the strongest healing of all. The wet paper towel, the kind of paper towel reserved for primary schools and places where silly people think they're more efficient than air dryers, is the medicine of the future. You busted up your knee doing a slide tackle that would warrant a red card anywhere else? Wet paper towel. Got in a tiff with someone and they clawed your arm? Wet paper towel. Maleria contracted from a mosquito a child trapped in a box of candy sticks you thought were just cigarette-simulators? Wet paper towel. Nosebleed?
Nosebleeds. Maybe not nosebleeds. Everything you know about nosebleeds is wrong. I thought I cracked the code at First Aid Training. The trainer asked us all to close our eyes and show what we would do to to help stop one. Cocky as fuck, I pinched the top of my nose, I leant forward knowing that if you leant back, the blood would "go down your throat". I was the First Aid Lord Victorious. Yet, somehow, I was still wrong. You do lean forward. But it turns out you squeeze the fleshy part of the nose, the part that makes you sound funny. I used to get nosebleeds all the time back in Primary School, but now I see why.
Nosebleeds are the one thing immune to the wet paper towel. That was it. In High School you learn viruses are hard/near impossible to nail a full cure to, but in Primary School you learn that nosebleeds suffer no fool to the wet paper towel.
For everything else, there is wet paper towel. I feel my knowledge is too strong. I cannot bring the training to the primary school for I could not handle the Nobel Prize for Nosebleed Prevention at Primary School. I also could not administer the perfect wet paper towel. That is a skill reserved for teachers and the mythical Primary School Nurse. Do they exist? Did I dream it? Are nurses real? Why are they not like Hello Nurse from Animaniacs?
They're even rarer than quicksand. And that's saying something.