One day several decades ago, after morning rounds, Dr. Prescott slipped into the ER where I was the cardiac nurse. She did something a doctor would never do: She placed her leather medical bag on a stretcher instead of on the desk. Her eyes locked onto mine.
“I’m having a heart attack,” she said calmly.
As I struggled my way through nursing school, I never expected my first job as a nurse to feel like this; I was too busy dreaming of the day when I could hold the title of Registered Nurse.
I never expected to come home crying. I never expected that, at times, I’d mumble the words “I hate my job.” I never expected many of the challenges I face daily–but here I am, six weeks into my first hospital job, fighting to make it. Here I am, figuring out what it means to be a nurse, learning what to expect.
It is early afternoon, and I have just finished administering my last midday medication. I emerge from the patient’s room to find that five call
Lying in a hospital bed while awaiting heart surgery, I looked at my teen daughter and my parents, then smugly pointed out the irregular slashes on the cardiac monitor.
“See these?” I said. “They’re called PVCs. My doctor is going to fix them. Make them all go away.”
The asymmetrical rhythm, a frequent and annoying pattern of multiple skipped heartbeats, had plagued me for the last three years, despite my swearing off caffeine and alcohol and trying different cardiac and thyroid medicines under my doctor’s supervision.
Evelyn Lai ~
Monday
I walk into your room in the pediatric intensive-care unit as two nurses are repositioning you. Your parents stand nearby–your dad in his frayed baseball cap and khaki cargo shorts; your mom, her baggy jeans wrinkled with the same worry as the lines near her eyes. Your little sister sits near the window with a blue hospital mask over her mouth, hugging her knees; Grandma sits snug beside her, back straight and hair done, expression cordial.
You are a fifteen-year-old boy with leukemia who came into our emergency department last week with fevers, but spiraled quickly into septic shock with multiorgan failure.
Marianna Crane ~
As I sit in the exam room waiting for my first patient of the afternoon, the phone rings. It rings four more times before I realize that Amanda Ringwald, our eighty-year-old receptionist, hasn’t come back from taking a rare lunch break.
I pick up the phone and say, “VA Hospital. Marianna Crane.” Oops, I’m not back at the VA anymore. “Senior Clinic,” I quickly add.
“Hello, my friend.”
The familiar voice makes my throat tighten and my eyes water. How in God’s name did he track me down at work?
“Mr. Foley. How are you?”
Dianne Avey ~
One night on my nursing shift in the cardiac intensive-care unit, I received a new patient from the operating room: an eighty-eight-year-old woman who had suffered a major heart attack and had just undergone emergency coronary-artery bypass surgery.
Her bed was wheeled into the room along with the usual accoutrements: six different IV drips, a ventilator, an aortic balloon pump and various other lines and monitoring devices. Her name, I saw on the chart, was Mrs. Green.
The young surgeon took me aside.
“I don’t care what it takes, just keep her alive for twenty-four hours,” he told me, clearly more worried about his surgical-outcome stats than he was about Mrs. Green’s welfare. The hospital and insurers kept
Kristin Beard ~
“Get the patient on the monitor.”
“How long has he been down? Someone get on the chest!”
“Keep ventilating. He’s in v-fib. Defibrillate at 200.”
“Charging, everybody clear?…Shock delivered.”
“Resume compressions. Push one of epinephrine…Hold compressions. What rhythm is he in?”
“He’s asystole, resume compressions.”
We repeat the process a hundred times over. The medic said they started coding the patient an hour ago. The family is in the consult room with the chaplain.
Kristin Laurel
It is the night shift, and most of Minneapolis does not know
that tonight a drunk man rolled onto the broken ice
and fell through the Mississippi.
He lies sheltered and warm in the morgue, unidentified.
Behind a dumpster by the Metrodome
a mother blows smoke up to the stars;
she flicks sparks with a lighter
and inside her pipe, a rock of crack glows
before it crumbles into ash
and is taken by the wind.
The call came at midnight. “He died,” the voice on the other end said. No emotion.
“How are you, Alice?” I asked.
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