Coming Around Full Circle (or Why I Do What I Do)

[kessadawn, BSN, RN]

I just spent the last two nighshifts in one of the busiest assignments I have had in years. Sweet baby boy, worried and heartbroken parents, a poor family caught in a horrible situation. I am physically and emotionally wiped out. The first shift I spent with parents and the mother's Aunt. I came in last night to meet Grandma, who had been frantically been trying to find a flight from the other side of the country while I was working so hard the night before. As the night went on, parents ran home to get some necessities, and Grandma and I chatted away while I ran my butt off. Grandma is also a PICU RN, and being at the bedside of her critically ill grandchild was a battle for her. The grandmother in her wants him to wake up, be normal, giggle, and curl up in her arms. The PICU nurse in her sees the situation is as dire as it could be. As we chatted, I learned she was originally from this area and now works as a travel nurse. As the conversation went on, we both suddenly realized that we know each other. I haven't seen her in more than a dozen years. She was a nurse for my baby girl, years ago, who had a genetic disorder and spent a great deal of time in another local PICU before she went to heaven. This woman remembered my baby girl, and me, all these years later. We both cried and hugged. We updated each other briefly on years gone by. This woman is one of the reasons I went to nursing school, one of the reasons I work where I do! And I told her so, and thanked her for everything she impressed upon my young, naive mind all those years ago. And then she said something that made it all seem right: "Years ago I took care of you and your baby, now you hold my Grandson's life in your hands. It has come full circle, and I TRUST YOU." Wow. Just wow.

[DGNurse10]

This story gave me chills....and was exactly what I needed to make me go back to work tonight after a sad night last night! Thank you for sharing!

[NotReady4PrimeTime, RN]

I've had a couple of experiences that could be considered similar. I think I've already shared one of them, but I'll risk boring y'all by repeating it...

22 1/2 years ago, well before I became a nurse, my son spent 7 weeks in a PICU in another part of the country. He had a liver transplant that was complicated by multiple strokes, rejection and MODS. He was so unstable on several occasions that we were sure he was ready for his celestial discharge. I was one of those mothers we all love to hate, who arrived right after change-of-shift and stayed well past the arrival of night staff. I got to know several of the nurses who were routinely assigned to my son's care. I trusted them all, but there was one who was really the epitome of PICU nursing. I loved it when she was at the bedside. When my boy recovered and left the PICU, we returned to our home town several hundred miles away and that was that.

Fast forward to 2007. I had by then been a PICU nurse myself for almost 10 years. I went to AACN's NTI in Atlanta, my first trip to NTI so I was beyond excited. Because of AACN's habit of clustering the peds topics into only a few time slots, I had to choose between a session that would have immediately benefited my practice and one that I really had a personal interest in. The speaker for the latter topic was listed in the timetable under one name and in the syllabus under a different first name. I told my companion that the speaker's name was familiar (my favourite nurse from all those years ago), but a very common one; the speaker was from a Texas city I'd never been to so I put it down to coincidence. Imagine my amazement when I saw the speaker, who looked very much like an older version of my PICU nurse-friend. When she began speaking, it even sounded like her... and then she said the magic words: "When I worked in Canada..." After her presentation, I approached her and asked her if she'd worked at the hospital where my son had been. She looked at me curiously, then said, "Ye-e-e-s-s... You look so familiar... OMG!!!!!!!!! You're Adam's mom!! What are you doing here??" I told her that I was there because of her, that I wanted to be her when I grew up and we both burst into tears. We're close friends now, having shared hotel rooms at 2 more NTIs.

The other story arises from the same timeframe in my life. When Adam was in the hospital (for 1/2 of 1989) my little girls were cared for by a very loving neighbour who saw to it that they ate properly, took their vitamins, went to school in clean clothes and all those things Daddy kind of overlooked. She was a very motherly sort who had lived through her own nightmare when her twin girls were born 13 weeks prematurely. One baby died shortly after birth and the other, Ruby, had CP and sensorineural deafness. She was also raising her grandson but she had room in her heart for my babies too. Her husband, whose nickname was Irish, tried to help my DH cope with the changes that had comeinto our lives with all of Adam's problems but had only marginal success. Not more than a few weeks after Adam was finally discharged, she and her family moved away and we sort of lost touch. In 2002 we also moved to a city about 800 miles away.

A couple of weeks after I got back from Atlanta, I was assigned to a premature infant with HLHS who'd had his Stage I Norwood and was critically ill. He had been on ECMO and had multi-organ injuries. In report I learned that his mom was deaf so would be communicating by TDD and email, but that by itself wasn't a big deal. I |spoke" to Mom, whose name was Ruby, through the TDD operator twice; the first half of my shift was busy so it wasn't until the last couple of hours that I had time to really look at the chart. When I saw that this baby's middle name was Irish, I started putting 2+2 together. He was indeed my dear old friend's grandson and I'd missed seeing her by a couple of days. I got permission from Ruby to call her mom and we got caught up over the phone. She was so grateful and relieved that there was someone familiar and trusted looking after her little grandson. (I only wish we could have given them a good outcome...)

In 2009 I had several shifts looking after the daughter of an acquaintance of one of MY daughters. That was an interesting experience too... it was the baby's grandmother who recognized me and vice versa. I hadn't seen the baby's mom since she was about 12 years old so how was I to know? That family totally trusted me to give them the real story of what was happening... not an easy thing. But they were comforted by the fact that they KNEW me. I like to think I helped...

[kessadawn, BSN, RN]

Isn't awesome when things come full circle? Just gives me reassurance that I am supposed to be doing what I love!