“Why do we nurses feel indispensable? Why is calling in sick such an enormous undertaking fraught with misgiving and anxiety? What is it that makes it seem that the world will stop turning if we don’t show up?”
An honest meditation by an insider…
Friday, February 23, 2007
If you happen to see Garrison Levey reading a thick tome on his lunch hour and you assume it is simply the latest best seller he could not put down, you would be wrong.
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The book, “Fundamentals of Psychiatric Mental Health in Nursing” is one of a mountain of 15 texts that mean more to Levey right now than any novel could.
“Friends told me they thought I would make a good nurse,” Levey said.
He was skeptical, but his wife, Adrianna, signed him up for nursing assistant classes.
“I told him, try it, if you don’t like it, drop out,” she said.
“I fell in love with it,” Levey said.
I like this personal meditation about what the four things in life that a nurse thinks she cannot do without…
“Knowing that there is something bigger outside of myself helps me get through a bad shift. A cornerstone of my life is the belief in a higher power, and that everything happens for a reason. I stop and ask myself what the universe is trying to teach me each time the shift is falling apart around me. Sometimes I think that I’m being taught patience, and other times tolerance, but sometimes I think the universe is pulling a prank on me, and it makes me laugh.”
Robin P. Newhouse, PhD, RN has been awarded a two-year $100,000 grant by the Maryland Cigarette Restitution Fund Grant at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions to conduct four studies related to smoking cessation interventions and counseling efforts by nurses in Maryland hospitals.
A day at ER sometimes transforms into not only what we are not ready for but also what we’ve never seen before.
Imagine a patient, a cocaine and heroine user, with body already in rigor mortis but you check the monitor – her heart is still beating… Blood glucose zero. Rectal temperature 88.5. Hematocrit only 7%. Blood pH 6.1 !
What do you do? How do you save her? Or try to save her? Will you be able to clutch her back from the jaws of the grim reaper or is there still a light flickering at the end of the tunnel?
Click here to read the frank story of Nurse William.
Blog postings like this should be required meeting in all nursing schools.
Courier Press
Susie Ludwig of Newburgh has been an obstetrics nurse for 26 years. She works at The Women’s Hospital in Deaconess’ Gateway Hospital campus.
For Susie Ludwig, becoming an obstetrics nurse was never a career choice. From the start, she says, it was a calling.
Twenty-six years and countless deliveries later, Ludwig, a Newburgh grandmother of five, still heeds that call as clinical coordinator for The Women’s Hospital in Warrick County.
“I’m really blessed that I can get up in the morning and know I am coming to work here,” she says, glancing around the main nurse’s station in The Women’s Hospital in Deaconess’ Gateway Hospital campus.
“It doesn’t seem like a job to me — it just seems like what I am supposed to do.”
Then you start working on a patient who had gone septic from an arthroscopic knee procedure. The patient’s husband went to the ferry to get their son to her bedside — a 2.5 hour drive.
Will the patient make it? Will you end up questioning yourself why, of all the jobs in the world, you have chose the nursing profession?
Read the rest of the story here and some of the comments provided.
Nursing has its own hazards and physical injury is one of them.
How would you make a come back after you get hurt while trying to help lift a 400 lb patient and have to leave for 2 years on worker’s comp ? The road back to work would not be easy.
Here is the story of one nurse who had to go through a lot to regain what she had lost:
“I am an LPN 6 to 8mos from being an RN. I have been a nurse for 7yrs all in LTC for geriatrics or multiply handicapped. My last job I had just started it was in geriatrics and I was 87 days in. I was severly injured assisting to lift a 400+# resident. We only had two lifts in the 100 bed facility both outdated. Anyway I recieved a crush/twist injury and was taken to the ER.”
“Of course my PCP wrote me off of work indefinity pending further testing. I was immediatly terminated. They said not fired just not going to keep me since I was still in my 90 days. It ended up being a pretty major injury I have been off on worker comp for 2yrs. In that time I have had two surgeries and will most likely need more. After a long tedious very depressing, dehumanizing court battle I won. I have had the two surgeries and intense physical therapy. While I have been off I continued with my RN classes and am now 4 classes away.”
Nevertheless, Jan retired Wednesday after 44 years of service to just three physicians, Bergstrom, Barnes and Dr. Mary Ourda, her final “boss.” She had tried to retire last summer, but was coaxed by Ourda to stay on for awhile at the Logan Alegent Health clinic.
Sage
What do you do when you have to show up for work at the hospital and there’s two feet of snow outside your door?
How do you drive to work? How early you get up? How much sleep (or cups of coffee) you need?
A great journal entry from a fellow nurse in Denver tells it all, just the way it is
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| Michael Bleich, RN, PhD, FAAN |
Michael Bleich, RN, PhD, associate dean for clinical and community affairs at the University of Kansas School of Nursing, was inducted into the American Academy of Nursing, as one of the 2006 new Fellows on Nov. 11, 2006. He was nominated for this honor by two current Academy Fellows and was selected by the Academy’s fifteen-member Fellow Selection Committee for his outstanding achievements in the nursing profession. Bleich was formally inducted as a Fellow with 54 other nurse leaders during the Academy’s Annual Awards Ceremony in Miami, Fla.
“Dr. Bleich’s dedicated work as an executive, educator and scholar has contributed to the discipline of nursing and influenced the practice of nurses in our region, nationally and internationally,” said Karen L. Miller, RN, PhD, FAAN, dean of the KU School of Nursing and senior vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at the KU Medical Center. “Academy recognition is an important reward for his outstanding achievements and visionary leadership.”
Training as a nurse requires so many years of specialized knowledge that sometimes we all seem to forget the equally daunting sheer physical challenges that confront us all on a daily basis.
Besides our indispensable medical knowledge, isn’t it true that most of us find ourselves doing a lot of physical chores just by sheer reflex, especially those of us who serve in ER and ICUs, to help control the physical chaos around us?
Here is how one sister described it so well:
“Tiny rural ER, tiny exam room. Patient had to go out by chopper to an area specialty hospital. In this tiny room is the patient stretcher, the chopper stretcher, the entire helicopter med team, and me - standing at the foot of the stretchers. I had removed the IV pump and fluids from the IV pole and was holding them in my hands while the patient was being prepped and transferred from stretcher to stretcher, taking care that the lines didn’t get entangled or dislodged. IV pump in left hand, IV bag in right and overhead to prevent air in the tubing.
That IV pump isn’t light to begin with. This was taking some time, so it was getting increasingly heavy. As I gave report to the flight team I placed the pump on my left thigh and then raised my left foot to prop it against my right thigh for support and continued to stand there on my right foot, providing patient history, with IV fluid bag in my right hand extended overhead. Not the most comfortable position to maintain but it served its purpose and I didn’t think much of it until one guy on the flight team turned to me to retrieve the IV pump and then smiled: “Isn’t that a yoga position?” “
Click here to read the whole excellent posting.
At some point perhaps we all become yoga masters without even becoming aware of it, combining the discipline of a well-trained doctor with the compassion and quickness of a Shao-Lin Kung Fu master?
Hmmm… never thought about it in that light. But why not?
Everybody’s talking about Nobel prizes these days.
Think about all the endless hours we nurses spend in all the emergency rooms, intensive care units, hospitals and clinics of the world, tending the sick, healing the wounded, and bringing light, hope and better health to millions around the globe…
Think about the qualifications we bring to such a critical public function and what would have happened if we weren’t there in the congested hospitals and battle fields of the world?
Isn’t that a service equal in importance to the one delivered by a Nobel-price winner author, doctor, or politician? Ask the millions who have experienced the magical presence of a professional nurse next to their operating table or hospital bed, and the answer will be a resounding “Yes!”
A Baltimore Sun op-ed penned by Columbia University nursing professor Kristine Gebbie and Center for Nursing Advocacy executive director Sandy Summers has raised the same excellent question and we hope it won’t be the last.
If there is a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, why not also have one in Nursing?
