Nurse's Story: Maggie - A Certain Light

Maggie -







Actually, I always wanted to be a doctor but didn’t want to go through the twelve years of schooling that was required for it. I went for what I saw as the next best thing, which was to get my BSN. Although there are times when I wish I would have challenged myself to continue my schooling, I have no regrets about becoming a nurse. There have been many moments when I have watched what physicians do and it makes me glad that I chose nursing.

After doing floor nursing for a while, I went straight to the OR. As a child, I always knew that I wanted to see what the inside of the body looked like, so I had no trepidation about going into the OR. For the past five years, I’ve been doing open-heart surgery.

The number one thing people considering going into nursing need to know is not to take things personally. And number two – it’s always about others first. It’s a profession in which you handle other people’s lives and emotions. You get a whole personal perspective about them. You need to stay humble and open, take criticism constructively, always do self-assessment, and just hang in there.

It’s really the people that inspire me in my career. I truly love the variety of people that I can meet in one place doing one thing. It’s hard sometimes to explain what keeps me going, to be honest, because there’s a lot of grief and misery that we witness. But there are also many moments, for instance, when an 80-year-old gets up and goes home and continues to mow the lawn. That is rewarding enough.

Besides my sense of humor, I think what really saves me is my spirituality. You really can’t see everything from the human perspective; as far as I’m concerned, you have to see that what really gives us our humanity is our spiritual perspective. It helps in cases where things cannot be solved; where we just absolutely get stuck. You have to see life continuing and beautiful beyond the physical means that cannot be helped. The medical field cannot do anymore, so something needs to continue to beyond that.

Once in the lunchroom I told a story to my fellow co-workers about the books I’d read on life beyond death.“You have to see life continuing and beautiful beyond the physical means that cannot be helped.” In many instances, elderly people with Alzheimer’s or who were really sick seemed to be schizophrenic or going between several worlds, but every moment would come back and say hi to their daughter or son. I read a story that claimed sometimes these folks are actually looking for us, the family members, to give them permission to pass on. I had a co-worker who was going through this with her mother. We all suggested that maybe the mother was looking for her daughter’s permission to go. The mother had been suffering from a very long illness, teetering on the brink of death but not passing on.

Well, we had this lunchroom conversation on a Friday. The following Monday the co-worker came in to work, gave me a big hug and said thank you. Her mother had died on Sunday. She had talked to her mother, given her permission, and she had finally passed on after all those years.

Nurses are really a container for the grief of patients and their families. In many instances, when you get off your shift and go home, you are grieving. You take that home with you. In my case, you work on someone 13 hours a day in open-heart surgery and you do everything that you can, but they just don’t make it. They pass right in front of you. How can you not take that home to process? You go home, you cry. Maybe sit in a hot tub or run a hot bath. You sleep, and you just deal with it. When you’re ready, you can discuss it with your co-workers if you want. But everyone has a different way of handling grief.

People tell me I bring a certain light wherever I go. That to me is a great strength in nursing, especially to a highly stressed OR team or unit. There’s a certain aura that people carry with them and we all have our own. Mine is this light, and having the ability to make people laugh, too, because I’m so straightforward. I just tell it like it is, which people seem to find refreshing.

Like in any career, you get to the point to where you know when you’ve accumulated so much knowledge in certain areas and you are ready for a bigger challenge. You’d think open-heart surgery would be the greatest challenge, but I’m about to make a move over to critical care because I have a desire to work with a bigger picture. Whole systems – respiratory, metabolic, circulatory – along with the medications given, is a challenge for which I feel I am ready. I want to be able to put one, two, three and four together, and get a greater perspective. It’s time to move on, and I’m fortunate to be in a career that makes it possible for me to do that.

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