Tending Lives by Echo Heron

Author:Echo Heron [Heron, Echo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56053-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

LESA B.

Lesa is a twenty-four-year-old nurse whose mother and grandmother were nurses. (“It’s a genetic thing.”) Now a divorced mother of two, she has worked in long-term care facilities, Alzheimer’s facilities, dialysis units, and detox wards. She also works as a paramedic on her off days.

When I asked her how she felt about nursing as a career, her answer was instantaneous and direct: “It’s not a career—it’s a lifestyle. It is your whole life. We are the ones who really see and take care of the patient. You have to be open-minded and compassionate and never lose your perspective … keep your head no matter what is going on around you and take care of it. In other words, you have to be one hundred percent nurse.”

I did many of these interviews over the phone, and usually the nurses had one or two stories in mind that they wanted to talk about. Not Lesa. She rattled off a list of stories, one after the other, giving each about a thirty-second spot. She barely took a breath in between.

I went over the tape four or five times, trying to figure out which stories to present and what style to use, when it hit me that I’d just list them exactly as she did.

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