My View as a Nurse

[Meagan Elaine Smith, ADN, EMT-B]

My View as a Nurse

As a nurse you wear the same outfit, clock in the same way, and look at the same assignment board for every shift. But as a nurse your patients and coworkers change every shift, and you never expect your next shift to be like the last. Nursing in a hospital is a profession where change is inevitable and expected at a fast pace, especially on a medical/surgical unit that involves caring and managing various patients and medical conditions. As a medical/surgical nurse I am provide nursing care for an array of problems and conditions with the goal of resolving, improving, or maintaining. As a nurse, I focus on assessing the patient, using critical thinking, and standing orders to determine what I can do to help my patient then advocate when needed. By using the guidance and advice of experience nurses I work with, I have grown in my first year of nursing. I have built confidence in my nursing skills and developed strategies for time management and prioritizing patient assignments during my shifts. I worked on proper communication with patients, family members, doctors, and coworkers; learned quickly which techniques worked better than others. I found the importance of stress relief management after dealing with an angry patient, disagreement with a doctor, or a death of patient. This is what I found as a new graduate nurse is needed to provide nursing care.

The physical, emotional, and mental obstacles within nursing is what makes this a profession only possible for a certain type of person. Add caring for patients during a pandemic to the list of responsibilities for nurses and it only emphasizes that point. All nurses take the Florence Nightingale Pledge, and the dedication of nurses I have seen during this pandemic could not be a better example of nurses upholding that pledge. As nurses continue to come in for shifts, they follow through on upholding, “with loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician in his work and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care” (Black, 2017, p.57). During COVID-19, nurses were working one to two extra shifts per week due to the lack of available staffing, a problem the unit was already familiar to without a pandemic. The exhaustion obvious but did not matter because they knew if they did not come into work it meant patients would not get the care they needed.

For me, I found working as a nurse and being the front line to care for people with an unknown virus surreal. Regardless of nursing experience and years employed, we, as nurses, learned together how to manage the continuous evolving treatments and protocols within the hospital while sharing the fears of the unknown. It is amazing to see where the hospital has come in the past nine months, protocols and expectations that were foreign to us now have been routine. I do not know how I will feel if the day ever comes when I am told I do not have to wear a mask when I am at work. How will you feel as a nurse?

Meagan Smith, RN, ADN

Virginia Hospital Center

Arlington, VA

Black, B. (2017). Professional Nursing: Concepts & Challenges (8th ED.). Elsevier Inc.   

 

 

[Julie]

On 12/2/2020 at 4:23 PM, Meagan Elaine Smith said:

For me, I found working as a nurse and being the front line to care for people with an unknown virus surreal. Regardless of nursing experience and years employed, we, as nurses, learned together how to manage the continuous evolving treatments and protocols within the hospital while sharing the fears of the unknown.

I know it's been said again and again, here and in mainstream media, but your words once again drive the point---->  All nurses and health care professionals making sacrifices to ease the suffering of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers in this pandemic need to be recognized as heroes. Thank you @Meagan Elaine Smithfor your selflessness in your work and for sharing on allnurses®.  Have a wonderful Holiday.

[JBMmom, MSN, NP]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience. I don't see a day coming when we will not be wearing masks at work, I think that in some ways COVID 19 has forever changed how we will be doing things in healthcare. It's been almost nine months since I held the hand of the first patient in our hospital that died of COVID 19 as he took his last (ventilator assisted) breaths. I can still remember every minute of his last three hours like it happened yesterday. He wife coming in to say goodbye through the glass, she was crying and thanking me, and for the first time in my career, I cried, and told her I was sorry. I sang songs with him, his wife and I had discussed his favorites, said some prayers (also discussed with his wife), and basically waited for his oxygen saturation level in the 50s to lead to his ultimate arrest. It was the worst day of my nursing career, not just because of the outcome but because we all wondered whether we had done the right thing. At the time, people that needed more than 5 liters oxygen by nasal cannula were intubated. Now we are keeping people alive on high flow nasal cannula, BiPAP, and other modalities. The patient had a challenging course and often times we wondered whether something else could be done. We were told not to be in patient's rooms more often than every four hours, and they were left alone, with everyone being scared. 

Fast forward to nine months later, I've facetimed families so they can say good bye to loved ones, I've done CPR in full PPE many times, rarely with success. (now all CPR is done in full PPE even for non COVID patients). Our overall patient population, COVID or not, seems to have gotten sicker. People that avoided the hospital for months stayed home until they were so sick they barely made it, and many didn't. We've had alcoholics that bleed out horrible deaths because they've been unemployed with nothing to do but drink. We've had clusters of contaminated heroin overdoses that appeared to be fentanyl or something else undetectable, but fatal. 

Didn't mean to highjack your thread, I was trying to relate that things have changed for everyone and you're right, we've had to adjust on fly. We're also working short staffed, most of us working 50+ hours per week. I know for myself, I couldn't do it with many people on the planet other than the ones I'm fortunate enough to work with. We are lucky to have chosen a profession that gives us the responsibility and opportunity to provide care for people facing the most difficult times in their lives. 

To nurses that have started over the course of the year it has certainly brought challenges no one could have anticipated. And while we don't know exactly what things will look like when we find the new normal, it will certainly be easier in many respects than what you've already experienced. Thank you to all my fellow nurses everywhere. Hospital, LTC, home care, outpatient, COVID patients or not, we're all in this together and our patients rely on us wherever we are providing their care. 

[Davey Do]

11 minutes ago, JBMmom said:

Didn't mean to highjack your thread

❤❤❤