Meredith - The Last Set of Eyes

Meredith -







My grandmother went to nursing school in the 1920’s and got kicked out for going to a dance. She was very bitter about that. But she had stories to tell of her training experiences there, and she always wanted to be a nurse. I don’t know if that’s what inspired me to go into the field or if I just sort of stumbled into it. I wasn’t really looking for it, but maybe it was looking for me.

I was part of the last class to graduate from a particular hospital’s diploma nursing school before they closed that program. But I feel very fortunate to have that education. It was broad-based, with lots of hands-on experience. My first job was working night shift on a medical floor. It was just me, the LPN and twenty-five unsuspecting patients. Looking back, I realize that the grace of God was all over us. It’s a tough dilemma because you can’t become an expert nurse without getting the on-the-job training. That I managed so well in that first job is a testament to the kind of schooling I received in the diploma program.

The experience of working night shift is a very interesting training ground because you have the added pressure of deciding when a situation is serious enough to call the doctor at home.“It’s the art of recognizing the incredible difference a good nurse who cares about her patient makes in their outcome.” One night, I had a patient who was having trouble and I was trying to reach his physician. This was many years before they had a true chain of command, so there was not really a Plan B if I couldn’t get a hold of the doctor. So I called this particular patient’s physician and spoke to him once, but when I tried to call him again later his line was busy. I couldn’t get through to him and he had no partner, no backup. There was nobody for me to turn to.

I finally asked the charge nurse, and she told me to call the police. So that is exactly what I did - I called the police and said, “I need you to go to this doctor’s house, and knock on his door and tell him to call me.” And the police did just that, and the doctor called me, and we took care of the problem. The next morning that doctor came in while I was still there and told the other doctors about me sending the cops out to his house. Even now, I know I had done the right thing.

There were dangerous situations I was in that I didn’t recognize at the time. It’s kind of like walking through a bad part of town and you’re just whistling along and once you pass that area, you look back and see all these people with knives and guns. You went right through the whole thing, but you had no idea. It’s like that with the minefield of situations and decisions that you make about patients. Years down the road you look back and say, “I cannot believe I got through that.”

I feel that I have been able to really make a different in people’s lives. For example, I recently had a patient who was undergoing a clinical trial for high-risk bypass patients. We developed a close relationship, and she really valued my opinion. But after surgery she woke up and had a massive stroke. It just broke my heart, because I had gotten really attached to this lady. As we tried to transition her out of the hospital, they were saying she had to go to a nursing home instead of to rehab. I knew that would be devastating for her, so I said, “No, that is not going to happen.” I advocated strongly for her with the discharge folks and the rehab doctor, and I finally prevailed. We got her out to rehab, and she’s now back home again, walking independently and caring for herself. She looks wonderful and feels great. That kind of thing really doesn’t happen all that often, but those are the times when you realize that if you had not been such a bulldog, this woman would have gone into a nursing home.

It’s the art of recognizing the incredible difference a good nurse who cares about her patient makes in their outcome. Once when I addressed a group of new nurses I told them, “Do you know how powerful you are to your patients? You are that last set of eyes looking over what’s being done to them. It’s your job to ask, ‘Do they have everything they need? Are we missing something?’ Don’t assume the doctor did their job. Don’t assume anybody did their job. You go digging yourself, do it for the patient. Have that sense of the difference you can make for their outcome. It literally is the difference between life and death.”

To me, there is no replacement for an RN. There are things the RN brings to the patient that nobody else can provide for them. And however frustrating it might get with all the demands on your time, there’s just no substitute for it. I think the heart of it is really caring about the outcome for the patient, and seeing that patient as a person. They’re not a job; they’re not a piece of meat. They are a person who has a life and a family and plans.

So I always ask myself, how can I help them with my nursing art, with what I bring for them? How can I help them process through what’s happened to them? How do I make sure that they come out of this encounter healthier then they came in? How can I work together with all the other disciplines to get this person back into their life?

We can’t lose sight of the fact that the patient, who may be incontinent and confused and crying out, is a human being who somebody loves. There is nothing more undignified than some of the things we do to people hospitals. So as nurses, we must be compassionate, and preserve the patient’s dignity for them. That’s what nursing is all about.

Power Strategies: Humor, Faith, Tenacity
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