At work the other day we discussed Home Health Agency and what Home Health Agency nurses do. And I was thinking about that conversation this morning and back when I was a HH nurse and suddenly I remembered Dr. Jahn.
HH nurses give report on their patients to the patients attending physicians and Dr. Jahn was my favorite long before I switched back to hospital nursing and got to meet him face to face. Usually when I would call a doctor's office to report on a patient, a nurse or other staff member would take the report, but Dr. Jahn always insisted on taking the reports himself. He was genuinely concerned and caring about his patients and was nice to the nurses, too.
Maybe it was because he came from a different time. When I first met him he was over 70 yet still working as an orthopedic surgeon. His patients loved him. The anesthesiologists said he was slowing down and taking longer than other docs during surgery, but they still said he was the best. The nurses respected him.
Dr. Jahn had only 2 flaws. He didn't write legibly and he smoked the worst smelling cigars in the world.
He claimed he wrote the way the did on purpose so nobody could read what he wrote. I learned to read it and often had to decipher it for one of his colleagues (whose own penmanship was just as atrocious so I often had to decipher his reports for Dr. Jahn.)
Dr. Jahn's cigars smelled like burning chicken feathers. Really, they did. A long time ago, people could smoke in hospitals. Doctors could even smoke in the nursing station. Dr. Jahn had no problem lighting one of his ill-smelling cigars no matter how much we protested. (But we never really did, because we liked Dr. Jahn.) Anyway, one evening shortly after he lit up, a new orderly came running into the nurses' station claiming that a pillow was on fire but he couldn't find it. He could only smell it. As soon as I calmed him down, I introduced him to Dr. Jahn and his cigars. Dr. Jahn didn't think it was as funny as I did.
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