I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937163136
Publisher: Underland Press
Published: 2013-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

A few years ago, my career took a surprising turn. I was a nurse, wife, and hockey mom to two young sons, and in my spare time I loved to write. One night in the ICU, a doctor happened to mention, “Hospital stuff is hot. People want to know what really goes on in the hospital.”

Who better than a nurse to tell them? I thought. I printed my stories and stuffed them into a plastic grocery bag. In the morning, I changed out of my scrubs and into jeans and a sweatshirt, walked to the office of McClelland and Stewart, Canada’s top publishing house, and dropped them into the box marked In at the front desk. Within two days, they called to offer me a book contract.

“It’s something new,” the editor said, “a perspective you never hear.”

He meant a nurse’s voice. We are quiet, sometimes silent altogether. Every nurse knows these stories, but they’d never before found their way into print. I had witnessed so many things that I felt I couldn’t say to anyone but another nurse. I rarely tell non-nurses or family members much about what I do. I keep it from them.

Nursing can be an extreme sport, and my stories are hardcore, with few miracles and no heroes or angels. I, for one, am neither heroic nor angelic; the nurses I know—hardworking, intelligent professionals doing incredibly challenging work—are no angels either.

It’s easy to sentimentalize or underestimate the importance of nursing. This became clear to me when I once heard a patient speak about the nurse who had cared for her during her heart attack: “She was so sweet. She held my hand and never left my side. What an angel.” In addition to holding the patient’s hand, that nurse had analyzed her twelve-lead electrocardiogram and monitored her for arrhythmias. She had drawn serum troponin levels and ensured that electrolyte levels were normalized. She had given information, oxygenation, anticoagulation, and pain relief. When nurses speak about their work, we mostly mention the emotional aspects of it but not the skills we possess, our scientific knowledge, or patient outcomes. That’s why I avoid popular slogans like Nurses make a difference. We do much more than that. Nurses heal people. We improve and even fix things. Nurses make all the difference—between safety and danger, life and death, and getting better or not.

It felt scary to tell my story. As I worked on my book, I knew by my physiological reactions that I was taking a risk: I would often get tachypneic, tachycardiac, diaphoretic; it would take courage to see this through. What was so dangerous? I wrote about the instances when I was more caught up with my own problems than those of my patients; the situations when I tried to be nonjudgmental and empathetic but wasn’t; the day a patient told me he didn’t want me to be his nurse. I confessed the errors I’d made. I wrote a lot about death, how we go too far to prolong

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