If Plastic Surgery Won’t Convince You, What Will?

PRAGUE — When Petra Kalivodova, a 31-year-old nurse, was considering whether to renew her contract at a private health clinic here, special perks helped clinch the deal: free German lessons, five weeks of vacation, and a range of plastic-surgery options, including complimentary silicone-enhanced breasts. ...

- New York Times, June 14, 2009.

... To sum up the story in the Sunday New York Times, there's a shortage of nurses in the Czech Republic, a country with a health-care system so restrictive to nurses that they can't even prescribe an aspirin without a doctor's OK. Also, they are barely emerging from an era where nurses were just seen as not much more than room cleaners and bed changers.

Now, I think it's fine to offer perks to employees and potential employees, but this offer needs another look.

First off, the German lessons are not as popular as the plastic surgery options. However, I could see that for a Czech it would improve one's quality of life to be able to speak the language of a neighboring country.

But what I really want to talk about is the breast implants. (Big surprise.)

Now, Lord knows I could use some liposuction to improve my quality of life and boost my self-esteem (no implants for me, thanks), but it seems to me the offer of plastic surgery and implants is similar to what women say about the negligee men buy for them: "It's a gift that men give to themselves."

As the Times article explains, part of this offer has to do with how the culture has been wrapped up in the post-Communist decadence with new, intoxicating Western influences. And along with that comes the Western-driven pressure for women to be thin and beautiful.

I am someone who has unfortunately been in-and-out of the U.S. health care system in recent years, and while I will admit I don't mind having an attractive, shapely female nurse - it does cheer me up - that really isn't what I'm after.

In 2006, a clot in my liver put me in the hospital for most of two weeks. For much of that time, I had blood drawn from me at least every six hours. So I was getting awakened in the middle of the night and stabbed in the arm or the hand, often by someone who was still learning the skill. (They were starting to run out of places to stab me, too.)

I didn't mind too much when they botched it. Afterall, they have to learn somewhere, but over time I grew to appreciate the smooth professionals who could draw the blood from the vein with hardly any pain. You see, there are no nerves in the veins themselves, so if you can get right in at a point where there's not much skin to go through, it's really a snap.

I had nurses of varying ages, sizes, races and both men and women, and for me the thing I judged them on was how well they could perform that one task. Even today, I will compliment a nurse or a lab tech when they do it right. But this brings me to my point.

If the Czech Republic really needs more nurses, a better course of action rather than the "gift men give to themselves" would be to ensure that the nursing profession is a respected and fulfilling career.

And if they really want to solve their labor shortage, they can open up the field to the other half of their population - men. Let the men of the Czech Republic know that they can be nurses. As I said, there are male nurses in the U.S., and they do a fine job. They aren't just the punchline to a joke, as in Ben Stiller in "Meet the Parents."

Just tell them they can skip the implants, OK?