Carry on Nursing
I forgot to tell you about a wonderful gift, so busy writing about tales of trauma, and pain, an experience that has been born from the ashes of all these horrors. Not born from my being, although there are three miracles that live and breath today that are my children. This creation started at the age of 20, and I am still living and breathing its existence now, basking in its beautiful ever evolving presence. My nursing career.
Born out of chaos and trauma, and cultivated over the last 23 years, I have built this career with love, compassion and healing, dedicating my life to this vocation. Every patient contact has been an opportunity for me to be part of healing. Every qualification I passed (there’ve been a few, some at Hull and some at York University) has allowed me to enhance the care I offer to patients. My work in nursing has stood up to the worst times in my adult life, an unwavering and continuous dedication to patients of all ages, from all walks of life.
I wonder if it has saved me from myself. Have I taken all the hurt, rejection, pain, abandonment, neglect, abuse and sadness that I have lived through and alchemized it? Today, I completed two 4-hour sessions in my private work and managed to have a 1:1 with my supervisor. I’m still smiling now with pride. She sat and read out to me the feedback that has been written by patients over the last 6 months, about the delivery of my care to them. Imagine a dictionary. All the negative words are redacted, only positive adjectives and verbs and nouns remain. She read the whole book to me, and every syllable was validation.
The last 7 months of my life have been the hardest I think I’ve lived through to date. The loss and grieving of family members I still and will always love has been unbearable. Finally living in my truth, while brave, has been utterly shattering. Yet, in the background of my own heartbreak, somehow my light has illuminated the journey for others, who’s own health has needed attention. Listening to the words, describing me as the smiling, kind, professional, welcoming nurse (sometimes doctor- patients often give me a promotion!) while in the background, I battle the pain of a broken heart. I am blessed to be able to transform pain into light, an iridescent transformation.
And I’ve always read that the nursing vocation is a creative one, often wondering why, visualising nurses drawing pictures of their patients, or writing poems instead of notes, better still singing the instructions of the bowel medication they are prescribing. But I realise now that nursing is indeed creative. Compassion and love, care for another human being creates magic. An interaction on a patient’s journey from ill health to recovery may stay long in their memory, only a fraction in mine, such is the speed and work pace of nursing. The intimacy of holding the hand of a dying patient, and witnessing their last breath, from a life you were never previously part of, is priceless.
There was a time, once, after I had finally felt the grip weaken, of a patient whose life I watched slip away where I witnessed something rather more supernatural. As I completed the process for verification of death (one of the less glamorous skills we are taught as District Nurses) one of the carers, and I turned suddenly to the sound of the wall clock. Suddenly, it was as though time was speeding up, each second pulse accelerating like the heartbeat of a terrorized animal. I imagine if I hadn’t taken down the clock to investigate, all in the room might have left it ten years older. There was no battery in the clock! And it finally stopped, at the exact moment that the resident had passed away. Not quite Amityville Horror, but creepy all the same.
Of course there are other less poignant, and perhaps more light-hearted elements to being a nurse and it would be rude of me to deny you the humour I’ve experienced over the decades.
I once had a patient wait four hours, in urgent care, likely sitting in a crowded waiting area, on the floor, with an injury I would assess on my busy 13-hour shift. As I called him to my clinic room and made the usual preliminary introductions, ID and consent, he showed me his (now healed) paper cut. After I put the microscope down, and then my resignation letter, I enquired as to the clinical concern. There wasn’t one. He wanted to check it was ok. I agreed that it was ok. And he left. There was another patient, this time arriving in a transit van, where I was called out to the carpark to assist, the call handler explaining that she had sustained a leg injury and might need a wheelchair. On arrival with said wheelchair, as she placed the affected leg out of the door, her calf was almost fully cut in half, so close to the bone that I could almost see the hand brake beyond. I should have brought a surgeon in the wheelchair. From paper cuts to limb butchering, the days are always varied.
I remember being taught to suture, when I began my training as a nurse practitioner in 2017 and started working in urgent care. We would use pigs’ trotters to practice on- not while attached to the pigs, there wasn’t enough space in the waiting areas plus there were no troughs. When I was considered proficient, I was introduced to my first “human” wound to suture.
Talk about a baptism of fire, only not fire, but a chain saw, almost to the thigh bone of the man’s left leg. I didn’t lie when I told him I was trained and had sutured before. I just omitted the part about him being the first with a pulse. The gaping wound must have been 10 inches long, albeit clean. I think it took two or three hours, plenty of Lidocaine and a lot of internal panic. Nevertheless, a week later, the patient returned and one of the other practitioners who reviewed him, reported back to me that the wound was healed, leaving a very neat, faint straight line.
I wasn’t even that great at needle work at school, but it just shows, we have talents in places we didn’t think. I did say nursing was creative! We sew patients back together again. But we don’t put zips on them or knit their holes up, although sometimes this might make our lives easier…
These stories are told from the experiences of the NHS and there are plenty more in the private sector. Money buys more than happiness, it buys even better anecdotes about the nursing world. A 20-year-old man, with a cough for 1 day, wanted anti-viral medication. After I looked for the hidden cameras and a member of Impractical Jokers to jump out, I composed myself, in preparation for a short but insightful teaching lesson on the difference between the common cold and common sense; the immune response was loosely mentioned somewhere in this expertly worded monologue.
I want to stress, while there is humour in many of my interactions, there is always a person; an individual who has entrusted me to their care. This is a privilege and while I have provided some snippets of tongue in cheek experiences, this does not in any way negate my respect and care for every patient I have ever experienced. From the cantankerous elderly man or woman to the feisty pre-pubescent child, they have placed their trust in me and whether I spend ten minutes or an hour with them, whether they are well or otherwise, their need is my bread and butter.
Way before I trained as a nurse, while I was working in one of my first ever jobs as a care assistant I was leading a shift. There was the usual hustle and bustle of a busy residential home for the elderly, me and three other carers keeping the residents safe and well. On this day, we were expecting official guests, and the Director was due to arrive to greet them. I can’t recall the reason for his lateness, but I can recall the exact moment that the two suited men were brought
into the entrance for my attention. Just as I turned to greet the pair, my eyes caught sight of one of the taller residents, elderly but proud man, standing over a plant pot. Now, it would have been less embarrassing if he was just doing the weekly plant care, but this would have been too easy and not worthy of a paragraph in this book.
As I desperately clung onto my depleting dignity, I try to ignore the trouser-less man, urinating into the Spider Plant, blowing his nose into a dirty white pair of Y fronts. While he is drowning the plant, I want to drown my humiliation into the nearest cupboard. I think the gentlemen took it well. At least they had the grace to step over the puddle and say “bless you” when the man sneezed into his gusset.
It was in this job, as a senior care assistant at the age of 19, when the then three Directors, with the votes of all the residents, awarded me what was the first ever Carer of The Year Award, 1994. I still have the certificate framed on my wall, the prelude to my forthcoming career in caring.
Some years later, still yet to qualify as a registered nurse, but providing equally valuable care to patients, I worked for a private company doing night sits. This involved going to a private residence and sitting for the night, for an elderly client, should they require help during then night. I was lucky to meet the daughter of an elderly lady who had enlisted the service, and she asked for me to care for her mother. This meant that I got regular shifts, three times a week.
Do you recall in another chapter, I talked of babysitters that I depended on, for my livelihood; this was it. I was working full time at university and the local NHS teaching hospital combined, while caring on my own for a three-year-old, and now working three night sitters a week. This was one of the hardest three years of my life, in more ways than one. If I didn’t work the 16 hours on top of my nurse training, I didn’t get Government aid for the cost of the Nanny that my son had Monday to Friday. If I didn’t have others to babysit while I came out three times a week to sit, I didn’t qualify. As you can see, there was no “give”. I had no choice.
To make matters worse, when I worked these night sits, there was little sleep, and if I managed to catch 40 winks, it was on a carpet floor, with a rug as a cover and a sofa cushion. I could be woken anywhere from four to eight times a night. I would dress the patient at 6:00 am and leave for 06:50, relieve the babysitter, dress my son, get him to the nanny by 07:00 and be at the hospital for handover by 07:20. I don’t know who dressed me?
I lived a life of exhaustion while I did my nurse training, but it was one of the best investments of time I ever put in. The Millennium brought for me some of the worst and most challenging hurdles, along with the most horrific personal experiences, but I survived it. I wouldn’t know then that 25 years later I would be talking about it in therapy. But anything worth having is worth fighting for, and I fought tooth and nail for my success in nursing, neglecting my own needs and boundaries at times, so desperate to avoid the repeated loss of the dream I gave up in 1995 when I got pregnant with my son.
