I began to doubt my career choice. Had it been a mistake to spend so much time, not to mention money, on a career I was going to practice for only a few years? Did what I learned in school so long ago really matter? Could I ever be a “real” nurse again?
A few days later, our three-year-old took a fall down the front steps. With my heart pounding, I assessed him for a potential head injury. His pupils were equal in size, he was alert and annoyed at my assessment, and his motor abilities appeared normal as he chased his little sister across the yard.
I breathed a sigh of relief, and several other events from the last few days popped into my mind. I remembered the phone call from my mom, and my explanation to her what a stroke was and how it might affect her friend.
I thought of the evening before, when I reassured our neighbor, whose husband had just returned home from the hospital after having a serious heart attack. I told her she could call me anytime, and I’d be right over. We hugged, and through her tears she said, “I’m so glad to have a nurse next door!”
And I recalled another day when I counseled my father-in-law on the importance of taking the whole course of antibiotics he’d been prescribed, and not stopping the medication when he felt better.
As I looked back, I realized I don’t have to work in a big hospital or know all the details of the latest high-tech procedure to be a nurse. I use my education every day, and will continue to use it every day of my life. My career choice was the right one.
I am, and always will be, a nurse.
Shelly Burke
A Nurse Named Gloria
He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh.
The Koran
“It’s a boy,” the doctor said in a weak, agitated voice.
After his wan proclamation, came silence. There were no comments about how beautiful the baby was, no questions about what his name would be.
Even the baby was silent.
I dared not ask what was wrong, though I knew there was something. Doctors and nurses huddled at the end of the delivery room. They worked with frightful efficiency, brandishing a menagerie of medical equipment to prod my baby to breathe. Within minutes they whisked Ethan to intensive care. Soon, the physicians rendered the diagnoses—meningitis, pneumonia—massive, life-threatening infection.
My husband and I began what would become a routine— visiting the intensive-care unit to spend time with our son. As we sat at his bedside, we couldn’t help noting that he wasn’t the baby we’d imagined. His tiny arms were restrained and his head shaved to accommodate piercing intravenous needles. Swaddled in a latticework of tubes and needles, his breathing was performed by the whoosh of a ventilator. More machines beeped and hummed an odd lullaby.
Because of the equipment, we couldn’t hold Ethan. Because he was sedated, we couldn’t even look into his eyes. Still we went, and the first tenuous days melted into weeks. Ethan was our son, and we couldn’t have loved him more if he’d been the rosy Gerber baby of our dreams.
Despite our love, the neonatal intensive care unit was a grim place. We parents wandered the corridors, yet we rarely spoke to each other. Dark circles ringed our eyes, and our faces had “Why me?” expressions. Instead of talking with each other, we spoke to doctors, steeling ourselves for depressing conversations where words like brain damage and seizures were used with alarming indifference.
To escape, I cried and ate big bags of M&M’s. And I prayed like I never had before, my faith bolstered by my need for a miracle. Mostly I waited and hoped for my baby to get better, while the days faded into each other.
One day, however, was different. I started my hospital visit like all the others, by scrubbing my hands with pink disinfectant soap. As I dried them, I noticed they were raw and bleeding from frequent washing with harsh antiseptic. Next I grabbed a sterilized cotton gown and pulled it over my head. The gown felt scratchy and the sleeves were too tight over my winter sweater. Even the color annoyed me—the sunny yellow seemed too cheery for mothers of sick and dying babies. I would have been more comfortable in drab gray or murky blue.
I trudged down the familiar hallway, barely noticing the piquant smell, a mix of alcohol and baby powder. I looked away from murals of smiling bunnies that seemed out of place in this somber setting. I walked by rows of isolettes and their small occupants, premature infants wrapped in cellophane to keep them warm, newborns with birth defects, and older babies who would never have a home outside the hospital.
At the nursery door, I braced myself to see Ethan and hear the day’s report of his condition. I knew it wouldn’t be promising. At two weeks, Ethan was still on the ventilator, still racked with seizures, still poisoned by menacing bacteria.
Then I heard it. A sound I hadn’t heard since the day Ethan was born. Laughter. It was not the polite, tinny laughter of visitors who were trying to relieve tension, but real laughter. Boisterous, robust and loud. It was coming from Ethan’s nursery. The sound was so alien, I wasn’t sure whether I welcomed it or felt threatened by it. Why would anybody laugh here, of all places?
I peeked inside the door to see a group of parents and nurses standing at one end of the nursery, gathered around a nurse named Gloria.
“Good morning!” Gloria called as I walked in the door. “It’s great to see you. How are you doing today?”
“I’m okay,” I said in a bland voice, still mystified by the cheery atmosphere.
Gloria grinned and waved me inside as she continued her one-woman show. I knew Gloria; she had taken care of Ethan. She had struck me as competent, sensitive and happy. But, tonight she looked positively radiant, as she regaled the listeners with funny stories of hospital life.
I wondered, at first, whether the babies were safe, since all the nurses appeared to be playing hooky. But I knew the nurses would notice the most subtle beep or buzzer while they had one eye on Gloria and one on their small charges. I joined the group and listened to Gloria’s impromptu performance. Though I can’t remember any of the stories she told, I remember how I felt while listening to her. At first, I smiled. Then, slowly, I dared to chuckle. Before long, I was laughing along with the crowd.
Initially, a pang of guilt pierced my heart. How could I laugh, when Ethan was fighting to live? But as I watched Gloria, these feelings dissipated. Her broad shoulders heaved and her frizzy, dark curls bounced as she entertained us. Her black eyes sparkled, and her lips turned up in an engaging smile. It was impossible not to be enchanted by her joyous spirit.
The more I laughed, the lighter I felt. My depression lifted, freeing my spirit from suffocating sadness. I welcomed the sliver of light, the brightness of hope. Nothing had changed with Ethan, yet I knew that whatever happened, I could handle it.
Gloria’s one-woman laugh-fest marked a turning point in Ethan’s hospitalization. After that night, I sought out Gloria whenever I visited the hospital. If there was bad news, I wanted to hear it from her. When test results came back from the lab, I wanted Gloria to decipher the numbers for me. When the time came to hold Ethan, to feed him and care for him, I wanted help from Gloria.
Gloria did help, with those tasks and more. She helped Ethan fight off the microscopic intruders that ravaged his body and the miracle I prayed for became a reality. But Gloria helped heal me as much as Ethan. Through the healing power of humor, Gloria gave me the will to smile and the courage to hope.
Lisa Ray Turner
“We’re conducting a study on the healing power of humor. As Boppy performs for you, let us know the precise moment that you feel the kidney stone pass.”
CLOSE TO HOME © John McPherson. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.
Dumbo
Of all the joys that lighten suffering Earth, what joy is welcomed like a newborn child?
Caroline Norton
I was the nurse caring for the couple’s newborn first child after his cesarean birth. Since the mother was asleep under general anesthesia, the pediatrician and I took our t
iny charge directly to the newborn nursery where we introduced the minutes-old baby to his daddy. While cuddling his son for the first time, he immediately noticed the baby’s ears conspicuously standing out from his head. He expressed his concern that some kids might taunt his child, calling him names like “Dumbo” after the fictional elephant with unusually large ears. The pediatrician examined the baby and reassured the new dad that his son was healthy—the ears presented only a minor cosmetic problem, which could be easily corrected during early childhood.
The father was finally optimistic about his child, but was still worried about his wife’s reaction to those large protruding ears.
“She doesn’t take things as easily as I do,” he worried.
By this time, the new mother was settled in the recovery room and ready to meet her new baby. I went along with the dad to lend some support in case this inexperienced mother became upset about her baby’s large ears. The infant was swaddled in a receiving blanket with the head covered for the short trip through the chilly air-conditioned corridor. I placed the tiny bundle in his mother’s arms and eased the blanket back so that she could gaze upon her child for the first time.
She took one look at her baby’s face and looked to her husband and gasped, “Oh, Honey! Look! He has your ears!”
Laura Vickery Hart
Bringing the Cows Home
For health and constant joy in life, give me a keen and ever-present sense of humor; it is the next best thing to an abiding faith in providence.
G. B. Cheever
When I was a teenager I worked at a nursing home as a nursing assistant. Although the hours were long and the duties not always pleasant, I developed an understanding, respect and love for the residents. Elmer, a patient with Alzheimer’s, was a favorite of mine.
Elmer was transferred from a facility cited by the state for inadequate care. He had no relatives to watch out for him— no one to care. Faded blue eyes, glistening with the dewdrops of old age, stared vacantly past the world around him. Inadequate care had left him bent at the hips and bent at the knees. Like a child’s zigzag line of indelible ink on the wall, the damage could not be erased. His wasted legs belied the muscles that once strained in the fields in the hot summer sun. Although his arms remained as strong as the mules he once drove, he could not conceive the limitations of his legs. We were forced to keep him in restraints.
But Elmer’s mind, unencumbered by the confines of reality, remained free to enjoy the pleasures of his past. Elmer still smelled the sweet of the evening dew on the new-mown clover. He still wiped the sweat from his favorite horse as they ploughed the frosty ground in the early spring. But Elmer no longer combed the fields and swamps looking for his cows. That chore was mine.
The first evening as I readied Elmer for the night, he asked, “Did ya bring the cows home?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I brought the cows home, Elmer.”
“How many?”
“Ten.”
“Well, ya missed three. Best go back and find them before nightfall. They won’t be safe out there.”
The next night Elmer again asked about the cows. “Bring the cows home?”
“Yes, Sir, I did.”
“How many?”
“Thirteen.”
“Gosh darn girl, ya missed two. Go back to the swamp and get the others. They won’t be safe out there.”
And so it went, night after night. I was rarely able to predict the number of cows that would bring the desired response—“good girl.” Sometimes I was sent to the neighbors to return a few cows because they “surely aren’t ours.” Sometimes I was told to wait out the storm before I went looking for a lost calf. Same time, same place, same station—but never same number of cows.
One night I arrived to find Elmer’s bed empty and unmade—not a good sign in a nursing home. I cried out, “Elmer.” No response. I ran to the nurse’s station and asked if Elmer had died. He hadn’t.
“Has he been moved?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“He’s not there,” I worried out loud.
“He has to be. He can’t go anywhere; he’s tied in.”
Running back to his room, the nurse and I called, “Elmer! Elmer!” Searching his room, I noticed his restraints were tied below the bed rails rather than through them. The crossed part, the part that should have been under the bed, was on top. I knelt on the floor and looked under the bed. There, suspended in his restraints, hung Elmer.
“Get the cows home?” he asked patiently.
Susan Townsend
The Crisis of Today
The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.
H. G. Wells
As a new registered nurse, I’d been assigned to work evenings in an intensive-care unit in a small rural hospital. Back then, as now, staffing was short, and I was the only R.N. working that shift. It was a quiet evening with only five patients, all of whom were sleeping or resting. I told the two L.P.N.s to go grab some supper in the cafeteria and bring me back something to eat. Leaving me to cover the unit, they hightailed it out of there before I had time to rethink my lousy decision.
I pored over my paperwork, the rhythm of the beeping monitors playing their familiar tune in the background, when my nursing radar picked up an unusual noise that flagged my attention. What the heck was that?
I looked up from my charts into the room across the hallway to see a cardiac patient standing beside his bed. Hmmmm, not a good idea. Then suddenly, before I could even complete that thought, whoom! His feet shot out from under him, his gown flew into the air, and he disappeared from sight!
Yikes! I leaped from my chair, shot across the hallway, bolted through the door and into the room. As I made my dramatic entry, I spied a giant puddle of greenish brown fluid spreading across his floor. Nursing diagnosis: greenish brown liquid . . . body fluids . . . oh no! Poop!
Too late! I was already hydroplaning across the spillage, arms and legs flailing to keep me upright. Always the optimist, my mind raced ahead with positive thoughts: I’m going to glide across this mess, land on both feet and save the day!
This, unfortunately, did not happen. Instead, my feet skidded across the fluid and then, whoom! I landed so hard on my backside, my head bounced off the linoleum. Ouch! I shook the stars off and rolled over to look for my patient.
Spry thing that he was, he was trying to get up. Boom! He fell again. I tried to jump up to help him. Wham! I slipped again. He tried to pull himself up. Whoom! I scrambled for balance. Wham! With arms and legs splayed in every direction, we looked like Bambi and Thumper skidding on ice.
After what seemed an eternity, our eyes met, and I realized he was laughing. “It’s probably not what you think,” he said with a wink, and motioned to our putrid puddle. A Styrofoam cup lay tipped beside it.
Totally discombobulated, I couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. “Huh?”
He shook his head as if to apologize. “I was hoping to hide my tobacco juice before you made rounds.”
It took a minute to sink in. Is this the good news or the bad news? Tobacco juice or poop: Which would I rather be wrestling around in? To this day I’m still not sure. But once I knew that my patient was okay, I was able to see the humor in the situation, and we both enjoyed a good laugh together.
Lesson #1: Life’s curveballs, plus time, equals humor. If there’s a chance that you’ll be laughing about something later, try to shorten the time frame. Laugh about it sooner.
Lesson #2: It’s to your advantage if you can laugh at yourself before others do. By the time I walked out of that room with greenish brown slime painted all over my crisp white uniform, everyone else immediately saw the humor in the situation. Since I was already laughing, my colleagues laughed with me instead of at me!
Lesson #3: The closer you are to tragedy, the odder your humor becomes. Nurses have to be able to laugh at some of the tough stuff or we burn out and leave this wonderful profession.
Nurses can find the sil
ver lining and the humor in the most bizarre places—thank God!
Karyn Buxman
“To help you better understand this good cholesterol/ bad cholesterol thing, Nurse Bowman and Nurse Strickling are going to do a little skit for you.”
CLOSE TO HOME © John McPherson. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.
The Assessment
Asssuredly I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:3
I have been a nurse for twenty-three years in various areas of nursing, but the story of this child, who I will call “Tommy,” has always haunted me.
I worked in a temporary shelter for abused and neglected children, ages birth through seventeen years. I sat on the floor in the lobby listening to the sketchy information the police officer provided. Tommy hid behind the officer, only cautiously poking his head out every once in a while when he heard his name spoken. He gripped the policeman’s finger with one hand and held a raggedy stuffed bear with the other.
I opened a bottle of bubbles and blew them in the air around me, all the while watching Tommy out of the corner of my eye. Slowly, he peered from behind the police officer to watch bubbles cascade through the air and silently pop on the carpet. Tommy took two small steps, but still held on to the officer’s finger. He looked up at the adults standing by him and seemed surprised that no one noticed he had moved. He let go of the officer’s finger and hugged the raggedy bear to his chest with both hands. Stealthily, he walked across the room and knelt down about three feet from me. His face was upturned as he focused on the bubbles floating in the air.