Happy Nurses' Day

Today is National Nurses’ Day 2005. I mention that because (1) nobody else seemed to have noticed and (2) I’m a registered nurse.

I was only 17 when I started nursing school at a large county hospital. It seems an impossibly long time ago. I don’t practice clinical nursing anymore, but for almost 20 years I was on “active duty” caring for the sick and wounded in hospitals and their homes. (I think I read that in a book somewhere – sounds noble doesn’t it?)

I can’t remember what I wore to work yesterday, but I can remember many of the patients I took care of years ago. Not always their faces or names, but their spirits, their essence. I want to tell you about some of them. Not necessarily the most memorable, but the ones I’m thinking about today.

I remember the mother, dying of cancer, who wouldn’t let us contact her son in Viet Nam because she didn’t want him to worry. “They’ll bring him home,” we urged, but she passed away without seeing him again.

I remember the young artist who lived at our hospital because he was quadriplegic and because his mother was a nurse there. (You can’t do that anymore.) I remember him for two reasons: he always took all of his pills at one time and he painted beautiful pictures with a brush held between his teeth. I was jealous of both talents.

I can never forget Flo. Her name was actually Florence, but we called her Flo because she wasn’t as long as her name. She was only a few weeks old when she was first admitted to our pediatric unit, but she was fussy, demanding, bossy, and totally adored by all of us on the nightshift who spoiled her rotten every chance we got.

I remember the young couple who began their married life living in a car. She came from a very large and very poor family. Apparently she had slept in the same bed with several siblings most of her life, but after she married she slept in the back seat of the Ford and her husband slept in the front. Since it was the first time she had ever slept by herself, he bought her a stuffed bear to keep her from getting lonely. They shared that story with me when he brought the bear to her as she lay in traction after breaking her leg. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I rejoiced with her that her husband loved her that much.

In the same hospital, a mother proudly showed me the red cowboy boots that her children had given to her for her birthday. She didn’t care that they were a size too big, and that they looked a little silly on her scrawny legs. She was beaming because she had always wanted red cowboy boots and the children remembered. They were grown before they could afford them, but they remembered. And I agreed - the red boots were beautiful.

I remember the patient who mentioned one morning that she woke up every time I made my rounds during the night. I apologized for disturbing her, but she protested, “Oh, no, I’m not complaining. I would wake up enough to see it was you and then go right back to sleep because I knew you were taking care of me.”

And that’s why I did it for 20 years. So Happy Nurses’ Day to me!