This was the HAPPY NURSES WEEK Message from Chris Porter MD, OnSurg founder. When I was an intern staring blankly at a dropping pressure tracing, nurses said things like do you want to start Dopamine? When I struggled to place a PA catheter, nurses said things like that looks like right ventricle. One night when two patients died in my care in an imploding ICU, I was scolded by an attending surgeon. Nurses encouraged me. When I’d been awake 39 hours and wrote a morphine order for 2-4 grams IV, nurses laughed and corrected me. One night I called the ward in advance to beg that a nurse be ready to help during the six minutes I had available to place a line. I arrived to find the patient in position, a Mayo stand replete with what I needed, an IV hanging at the ready, and a nurse soothing the anxious patient, ready to make the procedure easy for him and me. When I had no patience, no time, and made no sense, they understood. Kenya SilasIn Sudan, when a man swinging a club burst into maternity looking for the doctor who’d cut his wife, a nurse disarmed him and removed him bodily from hospital grounds. In Kenya, I lived in the nursing school dorm. These new friends took me hiking, taught me songs on guitar, and steered me away from machete attacks when we ventured out for beers. A nurse diagnosed my malaria when I threw up on rounds. I doubted her, but she sent me for a blood smear – positive. When I locked myself out of my car at 2 A.M. in Detroit suburban January, a nurse saved me from freezing to death. A nurse I’d never met gave me a room with a hilltop view overlooking Lake Victoria, in her own house, for months. Nurses have stopped me from implanting meshes upside down and from operating on the wrong groin. They’ve welcomed me to pot lucks where I brought nothing. They share their coffee, their jokes, and their ever-inspiring compassion for our patients. My mom was a nurse. She nursed my nonsense childhood complaints and brought me back to health when I was down with pneumonia in her home at age forty-five. I love nurses. Thank you, and Happy Nurses Week. Chris Porter MD, OnSurg founder
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 21:35:21 +0000
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