I'm a 30-something, and havent experienced much more than the general membership here, I'm sure, but I get the most amazing "stop and think about this for a second...." moments when I consider how much our world has changed over the lives of us all.
For me - I've lived without a cell phone. I was in high school when people who had pagers were considered to be drug dealers. I grew up with Oregon Trail in my teens. Most people didn't have computers at home. The mountain I lived on didn't have cable TV, so we had only 3 channels. Our roads weren't paved, and Saturday afternoons were spent jumping into the river swinging off vines. Call waiting and caller ID were a really big deal, but we didn't get them because they cost more money.
My grandma tells me they didn't have wheelchairs. She was a nurse in her white cap and skirt and tights. She had an alcoholic, abusive husband at a time when that was shameful to even mention. My grandpa tells me no one on his street had a TV. It was a really big deal when someone got one, and everyone whispered about it.
My 90-something patient told me about how so much of healthcare took place at home because you really, really had to be messed up for mom to go get the horses and carriage ready to go to the doctor. She got in big trouble once when she broke her arm falling from a tree.
What have you lived through? What pieces of history stay with you?
I remember the Brady Bunch on at night, as well as Little House on the Prairie. Soul Train on Saturday mornings. You stood up and walked across the room to change the channel.
I saw Jaws and Rocky and Star Wars and Grease in the movie theater. Movies cost less than 1$
A slice of pizza and a small soda was 75 cents meaning you still had a quarter left to play Ms. Pac Man.
I remember the first time I called my friend and a fancy machine called an answering machine picked up.
We had a phone on the wall with a looooong cord.
My mom wore her cap and a white dress to her ER job.
EVERYONE smoked. There were "smoking sections" in restaurants, movie theaters, trains and planes.
We played outside with whomever was around. We came home for lunch when the church bells rang and home for dinner when the 6 o'clock whistle blew.
I remember red jellybeans being "bad" and green M&M's making you horny.
I remember CBGBs, and seeing Metallica concert at a movie theater, Prince's 1999 sounding so far away, and concert tickets costing 16 bucks, and MTV launching and disco sucks.
Being scared of the Soviets and the USA hockey team beating the USSR and crying with emotion.
I remember taking my boards on paper and with a number 2 pencil.
I remember books.
I love these! We must've grown up at the same time......I saw AC/DC in concert when Bon Scott was still alive ! That always amazes my young rocker friends. :) P.S. I still have my "Disco Sucks" t - shirt from 1977 .
This is something I still quote and get a good laugh out of:
I remember when MTV played music.
When I was a kid, I loved playing old 45's on my red-checked suitcase-style record player. I still have my 45's!
I remember 8-track players and how annoying it was when your songs were split between tracks!
We played Evel Knievil. A few of the kids would lay down in the street and let another kid jump over us, on a bike, using a really wonky kid-made ramp
I remember one group of us kids would be on one side of the street and another group of kids on the other. We were having some competition going (don't remember what) but we were taunting them by singing "We are the Champions".
I remember arguing over who was cuter... David Cassidy or Shaun Cassidy (answer: David).
A video game was two sticks and a dot. It was supposed to be a game of squash
We passed paper notes in class. You could hide a small note in the barrel of an ink pen.
The "f" word was, indeed, the queen mother of dirty words. Not even adults used it like they do today.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
I was born in the fifties. I remember a coal-fueled furnace, and my parents had to get up every few hours and shovel in more coal in order to keep the furnace from going out.
Then we moved to the country -- no plumbing in Grandma's house. We'd pump water at the hand pump outside and haul it into the house for cooking, dishes, baths, whatever. Since the "tub" was a washtub in the kitchen, you had to haul your water in, heat it on the wood-burning cook stove and then get undressed in the kitchen, which in winter was freezing cold. (No need to worry about the pipes freezing -- there was no indoor plumbing. We used an out house. The phone was on the wall -- you'd speak into a tube and held another to your ear. You cranked the phone to get the operator, then told her who you wanted to talk to. The operator, Betty, knew all the gossip in the county. Grandma had electricity, though, so she had a TV.
When we moved to Great Grandpa's farm, there was no electricity, either, except in the barn. We'd get up early to milk the cows (by hand) before school. Still no plumbing -- but no outhouse, either, because the high school kids stole it and burned it in the homecoming bonfire. I had mumps when Kennedy was shot, and was staying with Grandma because Mom had just gotten a job and hand to work. I got to watch the whole thing on TV at Grandma's house. And because I was sick, I got to use a chamber pot instead of going outside to the out house.
We were all at Grandma's house to watch the first moon landing. "One small step for man . . . " Remember that?
Vehicles didn't have brakes because Dad didn't think they were necessary. (This was in hilly southwestern Wisconsin.) If you had to stop, you turned uphill. That was fine for the tractor, but a little difficult on the highway when a dog ran out in front of you. Dogs just ran around loose, and occaisionally you hit one. I cried and cried. Dad also believed that a tire with any tread on it anywhere was a good tire. I remember using his car one afternoon and having to change five flat tires, having them fixed at the Mobile station for less than a dollar each time. Dad laughed -- that meant they were already fixed so he didn't have to change them that time.
Gas was 15 cents a gallon. When it went up to 25 cents, everyone was up in arms. There used to be a "cents" sign on keyboards. Not anymore! I took typing class on a manual typewriter, and bought a used typewriter at the Goodwill to type my college term papers.
Teachers disciplined students with paddles, the "pointer" for the chalkboard or their shoes. If you came home and complained about it, your parents disciplined you again. It was assumed that the teacher was always right. If you misbehaved, any adult would discipline you.
Women had to wear hats to Catholic church. Nurses wore caps, white hose and white shoes with heels. Sturdy heels.
This is something I still quote and get a good laugh out of:
I remember when MTV played music.
When I was a kid, I loved playing old 45's on my red-checked suitcase-style record player. I still have my 45's!
I remember 8-track players and how annoying it was when your songs were split between tracks!
We played Evel Knievil. A few of the kids would lay down in the street and let another kid jump over us, on a bike, using a really wonky kid-made ramp
I remember one group of us kids would be on one side of the street and another group of kids on the other. We were having some competition going (don't remember what) but we were taunting them by singing "We are the Champions".
I remember arguing over who was cuter... David Cassidy or Shaun Cassidy (answer: David).
A video game was two sticks and a dot. It was supposed to be a game of squash
We passed paper notes in class. You could hide a small note in the barrel of an ink pen.
The "f" word was, indeed, the queen mother of dirty words. Not even adults used it like they do today.
This was ME. Every line. Except Shaun Cassidy was cuter.
Oh oh, remember Morgan Freeman was Easy Reader on The Electric Company and Rita Moreno was on the show as well?
@ No Stars In My Eyes, approximately what year was it when you, as a child, bought cigarettes? That is incredible! I would genuinely like to know!:)
Chiming in about buying cigarettes for an adult when I was a child--
I bought them in 1966 at age 7 with my 4 year old neighbor for her mom, multiple times. We may have had a note initially or she may have just told the clerk she was sending us.
The store was directly across the street from my house. I've never had the desire to try even one cigarette.
I remember when hospitals did not have emergency rooms. In case of emergency, go to MD office.
I remember my grnadmother nurse getting trouble for wearing a stethescope (did she think she was a doctor?)
I remember getting under my school desk for nuclear war drills
I remember when we got a TV. All black and white shows, all live, and the networks (3) were off by 9 pm.
By the time I was in high school I had a transistor radio to hang from my car rear-view mirror. Growing up in Memphis, that meant I got to hear Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and others doing live shows.
I remember when people sat around in the evening and talked to each other.
I remember lying in the summer clover at night to watch Sputnik rotate the Earth.
Cars had two keys, one for the door and one for the trunk.
Dialing O for the operator and telling her what phone number you needed called, phone number prefixes routinely started with a word,i.e., academy 8, meant the prefix number was 228.
Specializes in Med nurse in med-surg., float, HH, and PDN.
1971, MGH in Boston: open inventory med cart, 5 tiers upon which large bottles of pills sat;The usual range of regular kinds of meds, and Percodan, valium, sleeping pills, etc. which were never included in count. Only narcs locked up and counted were injectables. When a bottle was nearly empty, call the pharmacy and they would send up bottle with between 50-100 or more in each bottle.
I remember growing up in a time where everyone wasn't so easy to be offended. Where people were still nice to each other. You would go outside knock on your friends door and ask if they could play until the sun went down. No cell phones, riding our bikes everywhere was the best afternoon ever. We got away with more in school and we were disciplined by our parents.
1971 at Mount Auburn in Cambridge. Big bottles of pills in the med room, for sure. I used to go to the (dark creepy) cellar to the ice machine to bring up crushed ice for the patients' water pitchers twice a shift.
I was in college and working as an aide on 3:30-midnights there. I watched the evening nurses many times place butterfly needles for IVs and put the end of them in their mouths to suck back for a blood return before attaching the tubing. Really.
We had sheepskins for skin protection. Real sheepskins, wool, with leather on the backs. Of course when they'd been through the hospital laundry a few dozen times they were like a layer of pebbles, and I remember turning people and seeing the indentations.
Single-channel monitor in the hall, with the wire strung across the tops of the bedside curtain racks to the patient. Rotating tourniquets for CHF. Clini-something tabs to check for urine glucose, in test tubes; separate little white tabs to check for acetone (they turned pink to deep purple). Who knew how long that urine had been sitting in the bladder, but that's how we checked bedtime glucose.
abbnurse
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