Remember pagers?

Nurses General Nursing

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One of my favorite things to do with my incredibly outstanding medical nurse wife Belinda is to watch a medical show, pause the DVD, and discuss what's taking place or recall a situation.

Last night Belinda and I were watching the first season of ER when a doctor's pager went off. I paused the DVD.

The summer of 1987, I was working as a scrub nurse at Weed Rover Township Hospital, was on call, and shopping at the Weed Rover Wal Mart when my pager went off. I immediately rushed to the payphones at the front of the store, put in my quarter, called the hospital, and hoped a bystander could hear me say, "An emergency C-section? And you need me right away? I'm just down the street at Wal Mart! I'll be there in five minutes!"

Yeah. Glory Days and pagers.

Got any?

Specializes in ICU; Telephone Triage Nurse.

8675309 ... Jenny

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Specializes in Adult and pediatric emergency and critical care.

Even though we have hospital issues smart phones we still have a hospital ED charge pagers (as well as charge for many other units), and most of our call services still have pagers. My former level I trauma center still has pagers for every person on the trauma service from EMT to attending trauma surgeon. Back when I was in the fire service we were issued pagers in addition to our radios and other dispatching systems.

Pagers operate on a different frequency than radios, cell phones, and wifi. We carried them for times that other means couldn't reliably relay information to use to due to geographical or architectural conditions.

I kind of miss having the trauma pager go off during a presentation or some random meeting, but apparently that's becoming a thing of the past anyway.

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