"It wouldn't surprise me if they attracted different kinds of lousy people, though."

"That I strongly suspect."

"Some teenager my dad took in for graffiti once told him 'high school bullies become nurses if they're girls and cops if they're guys', he was just trying to needle my dad and that's not how my dad got into the profession but it seems like it probably has anything truthlike to it."

"Oh dear. That I have very little insight on, but it does sound concerning."

"I'm not sure how many of each there are so I don't know if it would be even theoretically feasible to fill out their ranks exclusively with high school bullies."

"Yes...the police have a worse reputation than nurses, but then their job description is more explicitly violent..."

"Yeah, and more of their interactions in general are adversarial. There's probably nurses who are nice as long as their patients take their meds and don't make inconvenient requests at three a.m. or whatever."

"Well, that certainly puts a strong limit on how nice they are."

"Maybe some of them only work on patients in comas! They'd seem perfectly nice to external observation."

"I don't think that's a valid nursing specialty but I'm not sure."

"I don't know either. It seems like it'd be a natural category but I could be wrong."

"Even if it's a natural category, if a hospital doesn't have enough catatonic people to occupy a nurse full-time they most likely wouldn't have a nurse just for catatonic people."

"Yeah, makes sense, though I wonder what they combine them with, what wing do coma patients hang out in?"

"I don't know off the top of my head but that one seems amenable to research." She takes out her phone and checks. "ICU."

"Huh, I think of coma as being a pretty non-frantic state, but maybe it makes more sense than I'm thinking. I suppose it's possible the media portrayal of coma as sleeping for many years and then waking up fine is likely erroneous."

"Oh, I know this one--yes, it's definitely erroneous. Coma patients aren't in critical condition like some of the sets of people in ICUs, but they still require large amounts of care--you have to move them to avoid bedsores, and eating and voiding are complicated matters, for example."

"Makes sense."

"And even with the best care available their muscles tend to atrophy badly."

"How fast does that happen?"

"That, I'm not sure about."

"One hears about people being put on bed rest, presumably that's also bad - maybe if you're not breathing by machine and sometimes picking up a fork and shifting your feet around that helps at all?"

"Yes, any kind of voluntary movement at all is better than none...but I think the bedsores thing might extend to people on extended bedrest, too."

"Even if they can roll themselves over?"

"I'm not sure."

"I guess a lot of bedrest conditions are ones where you cannot do that."