There’s not many things in this world that are worse than your hair falling in your face while you are taking care of a patient. It never fails that you’ll be wrist deep in something terrible when a hair (sometimes a lone straggler, tickling your nose; sometimes all the hair on your whole head, all at once, creating an impenetrable vision shield) will come loose and bother you endlessly. And you have no choice but to just let it bother you (or work blindly, if that’s the case) because if you touched it, you’d smear yourself with whatever body substance you’re covered in. Sometimes you can’t move the hair because you are working in a sterile field and if you did move your hair, the patient would surely die. Or something like that. At least that’s what I gathered from my instructors.

Needless to say, I wear my hair up when I go to the hospital. Not just regular up. I wear it in iron-clad hair-dos, guaranteed to keep every hair locked into place in a whole host of situations such as (but not limited to) atomic war or the zombie apocalypse.

Friday I chose to wear it in a cute braid across my forehead, pulled into a pony-knot, and I set it all with concrete and reinforced it with rebar.  The braid part looked like the braid in the picture over
<– here.

I saw our friend Josh that morning before I went to the hospital for clinicals. Josh has recently engaged Zack and me in a light-hearted prank war, and I was going to use my early morning waking hours to seek vengeance for his latest prank, which was putting fake parking tickets on our car during the wee morning hours. I didn’t get to serve retribution, though, because he caught me.  While I was chit-chatting with Josh at 0600 hours, he saw the braid running back towards the pony-knot and said, “Woah! That looks like a Rat Tail on the front of your head!”

A Rat Tail? Seriously? I was crushed. I thought I was rocking my practical do with style!  Rat Tails and Mullets are the two hair styles that I never want to be (even mistakenly) associated with, and there Josh was, making my hair nightmares come true.

I told Zack today that I had been charged with having a modern day Rat Tail. Zack, my ever practical husband, disagreed. “That’s not a Rat Tail,” he said.  “If your hair was braided right down the center, and the braid ran down your forehead between your eyes, that would be a front Rat Tail.”

That’s when I realized that maybe having a front Rat Tail wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.  Next time we have dinner with Josh and MP (his wife), I’m totally going to wear a braid down the center of my face.  It’ll be a close race to see who it drives crazy first, Josh or me, but it will so be worth it.