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Holiday Night Shift

Marilyn Barton November 20, 2016 1 Comment

My hospital’s Vice President for Nursing usually wore beautiful designer suits and stayed close to her office; but she was standing before me, in the ICU, dressed in a crisp, white uniform and nurse’s cap. I wondered why she was on my unit at 1:00 a.m. after the holiday. No surprise, there was a staffing crisis, and she was politely begging nurses on six floors of units to work a little extra.

Crash Course

Marilyn Barton October 7, 2016 5 Comments

Marilyn Barton

“Nursing students needed to work in the University Hospital, good pay, orientation.”

As a rising nursing-school senior in the 1970s, I naïvely applied for the job above without getting the full details. No one mentioned that I’d be working in a psychiatric unit housing twenty-five aggressive, catatonic or schizophrenic patients, many of whom had been locked away for years.

The entrance sign, which should have read “Locked Psych/Med/Surg Unit,” said simply “5 East.”

On my first evening shift, I overheard two nurses discussing how to monitor a new patient, transferred from the federal psych facility across town.

“Can we get the student to do it?” said one.

Dreamy Poppy Pink

Marilyn Barton September 14, 2016 3 Comments

In nursing school, to learn about human anatomy, we dissected stray cats. The tiny blobs and structures inside them looked more like toys than organs; at times I had difficulty telling one part from another.

When our instructor got us invited to the medical school’s Anatomy Lab that studied real people, I was excited to finally see a complete human body. Maybe there would be straight pins with little flags for each section of the heart and brain. I expected the experience to be like our Cat Lab: clinical and unemotional.

Bare Hands and an Open Heart

Mary Falk July 26, 2016 No Comments

I am constantly obsessing over fingers and toes in the ICU. They can tell us so much about whether our high-tech machines and drugs are helping to keep our patients’ bodies perfused with oxygenated blood. Some patients’ fingers and toes are warm and pink. Some are cold and black, even falling off. A lot are dirty…really dirty. Like with actual dirt clogged under overgrown nails. I won’t lie and pretend that these nails don’t gross me out a little bit. Or deny that I typically wear gloves when I am touching these patients’ hands or feet.

Suzanne

Priscilla Mainardi June 9, 2016 No Comments

I still remember the night I decided to become a nurse. My eight-year-old daughter had been admitted to the hospital following an emergency appendectomy, and I stayed overnight on the pediatric unit with her. A nurse named Suzanne came on at 11:00. She had short blond hair, a pink jacket and an air of matter-of-fact confidence. I can’t picture her face any more, but I can still see her hands–checking my daughter’s dressing, using a pillow to prop her on her side, smoothing the blanket over her shoulders.

Stubborn Thumbs

Joanne Clarkson June 5, 2016 No Comments

My maternal grandmother was a psychic medium. She read cards professionally and taught me card-reading when I was child. As a teen, wanting an intuitive skill no one else in the family possessed, I went to the library, checked out books on palm reading and studied them.

Throughout my working life, I kept this hobby to myself. Yet I used it both consciously and subconsciously; I believe nurses possess a clairvoyance born of compassion and the will to heal. We earn this through study and years of practice. Yet it is also a gift of heart and mind.

Going Solo

Amanda Anderson September 25, 2015 28 Comments

Amanda Anderson

I softly scrub blood from the teeth of a man who died moments ago. From the chair where I sat quietly writing nursing notes while he quietly ended, my patient’s sallow skin and sunken cheeks looked so peaceful. But the weeks of stagnant residue on his teeth bothered me.

To brush the teeth of someone who was in the process of dying would have contradicted my orders to provide comfort care, and my own good sense. So I waited until he took his last breaths before I closed my computer screen and gathered my tools–washcloth, water, toothbrush.

I brush now, so briefly, for the pride of this man I didn’t know, and I brush for the family that I wish

The Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room

Cortney Davis August 7, 2015 15 Comments

Cortney Davis

Let me not be blinded by the glare of the spotlight
or distracted by the tangle of plastic tubes,

the stink of anesthesia waiting in its multi-chambered
monolith of sleep. Let me stand beside the patient

and look into his eyes. Let me say, we will take care of you.
Let me understand what it is to be overcome by fear.

Let me secure my mask and turn to the counting and opening,
the writing down. Let me watch closely and, if I have to,

Birth of a Hospice Nurse

Sara Conkle July 10, 2015 18 Comments

Sara Conkle

The woman lying on the transport cot in the examination room was terrified. I could see it plainly in her eyes, but there was no time to stop and comfort her.

I was a young, recently graduated nurse in a busy urban emergency room, struggling to keep up with its daily array of shootings, stabbings and crises. ER nurses hustled. We dealt with life and death, and we did it quickly. That may be why I paid so little attention to the pain and fear in the woman”s eyes.

I asked her to get onto the examination table and duly recorded the facts: her last menstrual period had taken place several months before; her bleeding and cramping had started earlier

Teaching the Wound

Joanne Clarkson December 19, 2014 14 Comments

Joanne M. Clarkson

For LS

Assume pain, I tell them, the young, the
minimum-waged, those who work the midnight
shift with no chance for stars. We lean
over the bed of a 93-year-old man with advanced
Parkinson’s disease. His face is
frozen, even his eyes don’t seem to move
unless you watch the sheen. These

student aides are to turn him, bathe and lotion
his stiffened limbs. After they roll him silent
and awkward as a rug, I notice the bandage
discolored with seepage, covering his left
calf. The notes had not mentioned

Imperfect Farewells

Judy Schaefer October 17, 2014 6 Comments

Judy Schaefer

I was not with my mother when she died, her heart bursting
against her ribs, screaming for a violent release from her chest
I listened, ear to phone: nothing-more-could-be-done
I recall her now, prayer petals of morning’s first red rose, the perfect
Mezzo-soprano of a summer evening’s lullaby, an open window to song
Clinical colleagues reported massive myocardial infarction
I reported that I was an orphan

Tender Mercies

Janet Killackey September 19, 2014 7 Comments

Janet Killackey

About the artist:

“I have always been interested in art. I chose nursing as a vocation, but my interest in art continued to grow, in fits and starts, during my forty-five years in health care. I have worked in many areas of nursing practice and also in many mediums–charcoal, pen and ink, oils, watercolors and now mixed media. I feel that this piece reflects where I am now–merging my life experiences in art and in the practice of nursing, both of which bring a level of comfort and caring to others.”

About the artwork:

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: nurse stories

Holiday Night Shift

Crash Course

Dreamy Poppy Pink

Bare Hands and an Open Heart

Suzanne

Stubborn Thumbs

Going Solo

The Circulating Nurse Enters the Operating Room

Birth of a Hospice Nurse

Teaching the Wound

Imperfect Farewells

Tender Mercies

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fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: nurse stories

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