Starting as a Navy Hospital Corpsman for ten years where I trained for combat medicine attached to Marine Corps Units, I recall treating villagers in the Philippines. One elderly Lady literally crawled with end stage tuberculosis down a jungle trail up to me. I gave her Robitussin for her cough and felt like such an imposter as she, unable to express herself in English looked into my eyes as if I had just saved her from her horrible fate…32 years later I can still vividly recall my emotions.
The transition from Navy Hospital Corpsman to Navy Nurse seemed logical. As a Navy nurse for an additional ten years I was fortunate to work as a medical surgical nurse, trauma nurse aboard the USNS Mercy in the first Gulf War, Quality Improvement Coordinator in charge of JCAHO hospital wide preparation, and earned my first Master’s Degree from the University of Maryland at Baltimore in Trauma/Critical Care. Attached to Naval Hospital Guam after Maryland I experienced two Super Typhoons, Five Earth Quakes and was working in the Emergency Department during the crash of an airplane I recall, as we prepared to receive casualties the pharmacist running up to all trauma nurses and, without paper accountability stuffing boxes of morphine in our shirt pockets. It took quite a bit to suppress the overwhelming panic that tried to overtake me at that moment. Later that night, I recall a victim with a head injury being intubated and wheeled to the end of the hall for a corpsman to hold their hand until he died…there was quite a lot of that going on that night and burning flesh seems to stay in your nostrils for a very long time. Then there was the non-traditional nursing role as Operations Officer for a joint task force supporting a couple of thousand Kurdish evacuees from Northern Iraq. What a wonderful experience in public health, religion and just overall humanity! The Muslim place of worship was to the left of our medical facility and the Christians to the right and EVERY BODY got along…hum?? I worked six days a week/16 hour days for four months (kinda made shift work look pretty easy in retrospect!
I then went to Portsmouth Naval Base in New Hampshire where I coordinated a multi-town/military integrated weapons of mass destruction exercise involving multiple hospitals and all the emergency response ‘trimmings’. The Navy gave me a nice medal for that (still don’t know why).
After retiring from the Navy, I relaxed a bit taking a job as the nurse manager for two emergency departments with 120 nurses and assistants reporting directly to me. One recalled moment of intertwined tragedy and love was when I escorted a mother to the morgue to identify her two children who drowned. She told me “they are so cold”, so I wrapped her dead children in warm blankets and stayed with her in the solitude of the morgue while she held them. That I was able to pull the emotional strength to help her at that time was a blessing indeed. Then there was the New Year’s Eve when a man rushed into the emergency department and yelled “my wife is having a baby!” As an experienced emergency/trauma nurse and Master’s prepared Clinical Nurse Specialist I nonchalantly grabbed some gloves and walked with a confident swagger in the 30 degree night only to see two legs spread eagles on the dashboard of a van….delivering that baby on New Year’s eve is still a very close FIRST joy in my nursing life!
Guess that job was boring, so I moved to Philadelphia and worked in an inner city Level-I trauma center. Unfortunately, in the six years of working there I cared for more gunshots and stabbings than I did in 20 years of Navy nursing. In my spare time, I attended a Family Nurse Practitioner Program as I was hoping I could make a dent in chronic illness and maybe add a bit of preventive nursing/medicine care to my nursing life. That leads me (with MUCH left out) to where I am today…getting my ass kicked on a daily basis trying to provide as much care in as little time as the healthcare system of our society will allow…and LOVING IT!!
I would do it ALL again as the satisfaction of actually making a true difference in this world and sharing in the joy, hate, anguish, love, disaster, passion, and fear of fellow humans is a privilege few can comprehend. My respect for nursing and my fellow nurses has no description. Thank you.
Just a Nurse is a place where nurses can share their lived experiences of the profession. This is a collection of real stories from nurses and student nurses, in various disciplines.
Awesome story . Amazing how we take things for granted .