Word: bussing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nurse Lynn Buss and her husband, who have put three football-player sons through Webster Groves, wince whenever someone takes a good hit. She knows them by name and by injury. "Look, Matt Koch is playing," she points out. "He had an injured vertebra last year." She erupts when junior Jerry Bailey scores. "Hey, that guy was in my clinic at 4 yesterday pretending he was sick! That little stinker...
Nurse Lynn Buss is preparing for the Monday flood. Her "clinic" is tucked away on the first floor of the pre-1935 extension that she calls "the North Forty" because of its remoteness. The first wave consists of girls who march straight into one of three exam rooms, where they throw down their bookbags, turn out the lights and flop onto cots, asleep before they hit the pillow. Nurse Buss is unfazed. "These kids who get bused in from the city get up before 5," she explains. "They come here to sleep for half an hour before class...
...Nurse Buss slips down to the cafeteria to haul back a bucket of ice. "My major cure," she notes. "When in doubt, put ice on it." She flushes an amorous couple from the girls' room in the back. "We were just talking," the boy protests. The kids are already lining up outside her office: one girl is there for iron pills to treat her anemia--a poor substitute, notes Buss, for what she really needs, which is a decent diet. Another has a bruised hand from a fight over the weekend; a boy wants Tylenol for a stomachache; she gives...
...girl who forgot her inhaler is having an asthma attack. Buss draws her a glass of tap water and instructs her to gulp it down quickly; the shock of the intrusion, she says, often releases the asthmatic constriction. Part 2 of this home remedy is a shot of Diet Coke; the caffeine sometimes has a similar effect. Outside, the marching band is rehearsing the borrowed strains of On Wisconsin. Buss predicts, "By November I'll be able to walk out there and play it myself...
...school only three days a week, and each counselor, in addition to doubling as a college adviser, must monitor more than 200 charges. Regardless of the resources pinch, there will always be some troubled kids who simply escape notice. "I call them the wallpaper kids," says nurse Buss, "those kids who will be carrying big loads, but they're so quiet nobody notices...