It's Nurses Week!

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For Nurses week I wanted to talk about how important nurses are, how hard the job is, the special resilience you need to do it and the toughness and genius of so many nurses that I have known.

But I ran across this photo and it just made me smile.

This is my mum, Stella. She was an ER nurse and then a geriatric nurse. She had so many thoughtful, and often hilarious stories from that time.

Like the time she was on her way to work and was attacked by a stranger who had been assaulting people near the hospital over the past few weeks. She cracked him over the head with an IRN-BRU bottle and ran away, and then he didn’t recognize her when he came in to the ER to get stitches.

She always grinned telling that story when she said that she must have been rattled by the whole thing since she normally gave such neat, small, painless stitches - but what he got was something decidedly different before the police arrived to arrest him!

Or the time she had an elderly gent in the ward who was practically a caricature of a British World War 1 pilot.

Huge handlebar mustache, smoked a pipe in the hospital, had a monocle, wore his medals on his pajamas, and was missing a leg from being shot down.

One night she heard a loud crash and ran through to the room. She found him (medals and all) on the floor and missing his pajama bottoms as he looked around for his monocle. He put in his monocle and said “frightfully sorry old bean – got up to go to the loo and stepped on the wrong damn leg, forgot the Gerrys took that one”

Stella passed away nearly 4 years ago but I think I got my love of taking care of people and of great stories from her.

Now I need to persuade my great Aunt Sissy to let me have a photo of her as a student nurse. She is 96 years old and still does her continuing education to maintain an active RN license.

At my sister’s wedding she had a nasty fall while we were taking photographs. I sat and chatted with her for a couple of hours while surreptitiously (I thought) taking neuro-checks while she had a cup of tea and a biscuit.

I finally said – “Sissy, I think you are doing fine, but I really want to get you to the hospital to have someone more qualified than me take a look at you”

She put down her tea and fixed me with her imperious stare and raised eyebrow. She said “David I think you are forgetting that I am more qualified than you. I have been a registered nurse for 72 years”

“Now I understand you are in geriatrics – I was a pediatric nurse working with children with muscular dystrophy. Did you happen to see the article in the Lancet last May about that – some fascinating research we didn’t have in my day”

She went on to tell me all about the neuroscience article that she had read in a medical journal 7 months earlier.

Safe to say in her 90’s and after a fall she was not showing any cognitive issues.

Nurses are a special group. My mum was, my great aunt still is.

I could tell stories for weeks about the great nurses I have worked with; Shawn, Jennifer, Heather, Marilyn, Josie, Liz, Al, Patty, Kyla –far too many to name. But they all had some things in common.

They are wicked smart. Have the sense of humor that you need to have to survive in daily life and death situations. They were always learning and teaching.

They were competent, compassionate, and in a crisis – in command

Nurses (and that definitely includes nursing aides!) save lives. They make our bad healthcare systems work – sometimes by sheer force of will.

Now it is incumbent on all of us to work to make sure nurses get the respect, the pay, and the support they deserve.