I know I compare myself to her and compare our roles in the healthcare system. I sometimes feel like she sees medicine as being superior to nursing, but maybe it's me doing it too?
It shouldn't bother me so much, to see this person I have been such good friends with learning and advancing and giving her all to a career that is no doubt a challenging and noble one. But lately, it has.
It's strange for me to see this old friend of mine - this peer, this equal - round with the doctors on MY kids, my N., my R., my A. and my J., to ask me how they've done overnight, how their intake and output has been, and whether or not I got those labs drawn. Sometimes, at times like this, I look at the physicians rounding and just stop and think. What happened here? How did I end up the one changing diapers and measuring urine?
In thinking about this, I realized I need merely to consider at what I do on a daily basis. I love the kids and families I care for, and love my role in educating them and helping to make awful situations better. I think it's that I wish everybody else knew how hard my job is, and how hard I try, and how much effort and time and learning goes into it.
Maybe it's because I'm so angry lately at the medical shows on TV - constantly putting down the nurses and demeaning the profession as a whole. To me, nursing is.. a bit of a strange profession.
I educate people on conditions and diseases, central lines, Insulin administration, glucose control, pain meds, lab values, home equipment, oxygen, how to feed their babies who have G-tubes and NG's and need TPN/IL. I teach them how to tell if their child with cancer has neutropenia or is septic, how to tell if their post-op kid is losing circulation to their feet, how to care for external fixators, how to change the dressing under a Halo vest, how they need to stick a needle in their child every day so that their white blood cell counts rise, etc. etc. I draw labs, place feeding tubes, give chemotherapy, antibiotics, immune globulins, blood, clotting factors and dialysis, feed babies (PO? NG? G-tube? IV?), hug parents, cuddle abused children, bolus septic children, change dressings, dress burns, give pain meds & narcotics (and Narcan and O2 when their respiratory drive declines), and cry with mothers at funerals.
I take care of kids with sickle cell pain crises, with cancer, with trachs, with failing kidneys, with spinal and neurotrauma, with congenital heart disease and genetic defects (Down's, Dandy-Walker, even Progeria, for goodness sake). I work with kids who are post-op, who have asthma and CF, who have MR/CP (and usually the greatest parents in the world...), who have short gut, ostomies, and brand new transplanted organs.
I give my opinions on their conditions and what they might need, and work with doctors, PT, OT, SW, speech, home health, pharmacy, the clinics, storeroom, dietary, radiology, surgery etc. etc. to get what these kids need. As I tell them, it's my job to make sure they are well taken care of, comfortable and getting better. I think I work with the kids that we don't usually think about on a day to day basis. I am a teacher, healthcare provider, waitress and maid rolled into one. And it might just be the best job ever.
But I also change beds & diapers, bathe patients, measure everything going in & out [aka doing the dirty work], carry out orders, be the intermediary who gets anger and frustration taken out upon.. and I spend lots of time "alerting MD's" to various facts. What an interesting contradiction.
J. is a little boy who has practically grown up on the unit I work on. He has been in and out for as long as anybody can remember with an assortment of pretty severe GI issues, and he never has any family with him. Every couple of months he comes back in with an infected central line and some degree of septic shock, and we all worry.
I might want to be an NP one day, or maybe change careers entirely. Time will tell. For now, though, I think it's enough that on March 12th, 2008, I had little J. feeling well enough to come out of his room to dance and sing with all the staff at the nurses' station. And as I carried him back to his bed, I smiled as he repeated back to me that he is the best J. in the whole wide world. This is exactly where I need to be.
