Lives in the Balance: Nurses' Stories from the ICU by Shalof Tilda

Author:Shalof, Tilda [Shalof, Tilda]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Kaplan Trade
Published: 2009-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Nursing the Machines

Cecilia Fulton, RN, BScN

“So, why did you decide to go into nursing?”

I looked up at the face of my first nursing teacher, who was asking me that question. Many of my classmates had a long tradition of nurses in their families. Others were drawn to the profession by the prestige of starched white uniform and cap, and others were apparently just so damn caring that they never considered doing anything else. Nursing was their “calling.”

“I didn’t think I could make it as a professional game show contestant,” I told her. That was my brilliant reason for deciding to become a nurse.

Some ten years after cracking that joke, I rose through the ranks and found myself working in the busiest ICU in one of the largest medical centers in Canada. For many years, being part of that elite group of ICU nurses felt like the place where I belonged. It had never been enough for me to be a floor nurse, working in the general medical-surgical wards.

It had taken me a while to master the technical aspect of my job, learning to operate the machines and to keep the miles of IV tubing from strangling the patient. But after a few years, after I had progressed from novice to expert, I even began to look forward to challenging, busy days when my patients were so critically ill and unstable that I barely had time to look at them, much less talk to them. Keeping fluids balanced, titrating inotropes, weaning patients off the ventilator were skills that kept my mind engaged. At times, I was so focussed on the equipment, it felt like those machines—the ventilator, cardiac monitor, drains, IV—were my patients.

I worked in the ICU for years. I progressed to teaching new medical residents and putting them through their paces. I cherished moments like witnessing a transplant recipient take his first breath with his new set of lungs. I bonded with the other ICU nurses when we went out for drinks after work and got together on our days off, swapping our ICU stories and gossiping about the indiscretions of some of our fellow nurses.

Not many of those patients made it out of the ICU; many of those who did probably didn’t make it home. They were still extremely ill, many chronically so, with multiple medical problems. To me, the ICU was kind of like a game show: you never knew what was waiting behind door number one or two….

It was probably a combination of age and personal growth that drew my focus from the bells and whistles and back to that person sinking between the bed rails. I am all for not going “gently into that good night,” to quote the poet Dylan Thomas, but for God’s sake, when that’s what someone needs or wants to do (and nature tells us that the end is unavoidable), who am I to pump them full of medications, tubes, and oxygen just so it can be said they fought the good

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.