Once a Nurse, Always a Nurse

Thanks to a string of bad luck this week, I had plenty of time to reminisce with nurses in Urgent Care clinics and the Emergency room.  I will tell you that tripping on a 3” pot hole on the sidewalk can lead to a damaged hand, and that a 24-hour flu bug with more trips to the bathroom than one can count can lead to major dehydration.

But that’s a story for another day.

I decided that once a nurse, one’s always a nurse.  Even when one’s been out of the system for 20 years, things of importance come back to you.  The fall elicited the skill from within of how to splint an injured hand using a flat pack of gum and an ACE bandage.  Not being able to sit up without my ears ringing meant I was dehydrated, not that angels were humming to me.

What I remembered most, though, were nursing school stories and the things nurses find themselves doing to help our patients, for better or worse.

I graduated from nursing school in 1984.  This, to some of you, is equivalent to the Dark Ages.  We drew blood without gloves, some nurses still wore traditional nursing caps, and we used glass thermometers with mercury that one had to shake to get back down to zero degrees for the next patient. 

One of the exciting new additions in the hospital in 1983 was an electric thermometer, the kind they now put under your tongue and…beep… displays the digital reading of your temperature.  Our contraption had a 50-pound base that plugged into the wall.  Attached to this base were four lightweight packs (less than 1 pound each) that nurses removed, hung around their necks, and took into their patients’ rooms when gathering vital signs.

I remember being at the nurses’ station as a student.  Suddenly the chief nurse was running up and down the hall frantically shouting, “Someone’s stolen our new thermometer machine!”  Then, at the far end of the hall, I saw my classmate laboriously lugging the heavy base from one patient’s room to the next with the long cord dragging behind her.  She innocently failed to realize there were portable units.

A nurse friend of mine tells of the time a genuinely grumpy doctor was doing an exam on an elderly woman with poor hearing.  Every time he would say, “Wiggle your toes for me,” she would instead stick out her tongue and wiggle it.  Perhaps this is funny only after working a 12-hour shift, but we laughed and laughed…not at the patient, but at the mental visual of how the not-humored doctor reacted!

Sometimes experience is the best teacher.  A nursing classmate was in charge of collecting and refilling the water pitchers for every room on our hospital floor.  It was her first time.  Suddenly there was a swarm of nursing students coming to her rescue before the instructor could see what had happened.  She had collected every male patient’s plastic urinal and had begun filling them with ice and water.  The only way to save this classmate from getting an F was to come to her aid. 

One of my favorite stories as a brand new nurse took place at Walter Reed in Washington D.C.  I was on the neurosurgical floor with another nurse who followed protocol and textbooks like the law.  That evening we had a young soldier with a brain tumor that could not go to sleep because he kept seeing chickens in his room.

I knew the correct thing to do was to bring him back to reality at all costs.  I wanted to “chase the chickens out of the room” to calm him down, but I also knew I was working with the other nurse who would totally disapprove.  I asked for her help, and she walked into his room to ask what the fuss was all about.

Claiming that he was surrounded by chickens, the nurse stoically walked to his door, methodically looked up and down the hall, and—with all of the composure in the world--walked back in.  She looked at me squarely in the eyes and said, “Let’s do this.”

And with that, she and I started swinging our arms while beckoning, “Shoo, Shoo, Shoo” as we chased the foul out of the room.  Not surprisingly, the patient slept calmly for the rest of the night.

The same nursing classmate who had “stolen” the electric thermometer would later pull another faux pas.  This time she was checking the hearing of a patient.  It is protocol to inform patients to raise a hand when they hear a high or low-pitched sound in the earphones.  Other nursing students walked in half-way through the test.  We stood in amazement as sounds were sent to this patient’s earphones, one after another, with no response. 

Suddenly, the patient jumped from her chair and said, “Whew!  That was a LOUD one!”  Unaware to the rest of us, my friend had failed to tell this woman to raise a hand whenever she heard a sound. 

Let’s just say that I bet her ears were ringing, and this time it wasn’t from dehydration.