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Zoey Barkow in Nurse Jackie

Showtime’s newest show, Nurse Jackie, chronicles the day-to-day life of the heroine, Nurse Jackie. Behind the spotlight, however, is Zoey Barkow, a first-year nursing student and Nurse Jackie’s assistant nurse. Zoey is a rare example of the nursing assistant’s role in a modern hospital.

Halfway through the first episode, Jackie and Zoey lead a battered prostitute, covered in bloody cuts, holding the severed ear of the customer responsible for her injuries. While it’s completely unbelievable to think that a nurse and nursing student would be the only people caring for a patient with such extensive trauma, Jackie’s faith in Zoey on her first day on the job is even more ridiculous.

During the altercation, the prostitute managed to cut off her attacker’s ear. Jackie trustingly gives Zoey her ear to take care of for her. A nursing assistant on her first assignment would not be trusted with a body part of hers, as evidenced by Zoey’s immediate reaction: throw up on the floor.

In the eighth episode, “Pupils”, Zoey tells Jackie about a show she watched about eyeballs, and Jackie chides her for not paying enough attention to them during checkups. Zoey’s carelessness in the area causes her to deliver medication to patients with no real trouble. As Jackie says: “You like students so much that you just make sure to review them.”

Would a nursing assistant deliver medication to Dave the addict? No. Hospitals have mechanisms and employees in place to prevent hazards like these from happening. This is shown again in the eleventh episode when Zoey accidentally overdoses on painkillers to a patient, causing her to slip into a coma. A nursing assistant would never be allowed to administer so many medications to a patient without supervision.

One of the truest interactions between Zoey and her coworkers is her relationship with Dr. Eleanor O’Hara. In the third episode, Zoey is paraded around with her new stethoscope, which O’Hara promptly grabs during one of her procedures. Though it’s unlikely that Zoey would have been running IVs as she claims to have been when it was discovered that she was missing her stethoscope, the power play between the two is true to form for her.

Jackie informs Zoey about the rudeness of the doctors and her way of taking things. Things like “sandwiches. Stethoscopes. Credit”, urging her to assert herself before Dr. O’Hara to claim ownership of her. However, Zoey can’t work up the courage to ask for it, and Dr. O’Hara tells Jackie over lunch that she knows she took the stethoscope, but that she has enjoyed watching Zoey obsess over it.

Many first-year nursing students suffer from the same fears as Zoey. She is of a different race than her coworkers, she wears panda earrings and patterned scrubs. She is young. It is completely logical that a newcomer to the field would fear someone with much more experience. This would be one of the main causes of the disparity in power between a nursing assistant and an emergency physician.

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