One winter night, when I was a child, I kept asking for TUMS and spiked a fever. Intense pain shot through my body. My stomach felt hard as a rock. Our family physician rushed from his house nearby to check on me. Using a few tools from his medical bag, Dr. Hart performed an assessment.
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As a new nurse, I practiced the “Five Rs” of medication administration with religious devotion: right patient, right medication, right route, right dose and right time. Over the next thirty years, I gave thousands of pills to patients.
Early one morning, my fellow RN called out from within a patient’s hospital room, “Getting ready for medical transport, need some help!”
Peeking into the room, “What can I do?”
Tanya replied, “Get Mrs. Smith’s meds.”
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People cheered the first trucker transporting a huge load of COVID-19 vaccines as he left the Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The news anchor exclaimed, “This just might be the beginning of the end.” That driver represented one individual in a long chain of workers besides doctors and nurses needed to end the COVID-19 pandemic.
A few days before, an email from the state health commissioner had popped up in my in-box. Its subject line caught my attention: “Urgent: Volunteers Needed for Vaccination Campaign.” To me, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel now that a vaccine is a reality. I felt excited to help and answered the call without hesitation. As an RN who has given hundreds of tetanus injections to ER patients, I have medication administration skills to offer such an effort.
Coming Out of Retirement Read More »
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