What It’s Is Like to Be a Nurse
I was born in Jamaica in the West Indies and began my nursing career there in the late 1940’s when I was still a teen-ager. So, for twenty-four years I have been nursing, both in Jamaica and in the United States.
I have cared for thousands of patients afflicted with practically every disease and ailment imaginable. I have worked in the operating room, tended torn and mangled accident victims, comforted the dying, and performed scores of other nurse’s tasks. I have many times known the sadness and frustration, as well as the elation and joys, common to nursing.
Often, I have been asked: “Why did you choose this profession? I could never be a nurse.” Or one may hear it said: “You have to be a born nurse.” But is this so?
A Difficult Job
As with other jobs, considerable education and training are required to be a good nurse. It also takes courage, and a real desire to help fellow humans. Keeping physically fit, too, is because one’s being exposed to communicable diseases. But a good nurse will especially have sympathy for patients and give of herself to furnish their needs.
However, it is much easier to say this than to do it. For a nurse may, days on end, week in and week out, care for suffering or even dying persons. This can harden her, causing her to become indifferent toward the needs of patients. But that does not have to happen. There are nurses who are deeply moved by the plight of their patients.
I can remember, for example, a young patient that I had a few years ago at the Carson Peck Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. She was a sweet person, only about thirty-six years old. Three years or so before, she had a cancerous breast removed, and now she had another cancer operation. Looking at her, you would never know that she was sick. But her body was filled with cancer.
I really felt sympathy for her, for she had such a will to live. I do not think she ever accepted the fact that she was going to die. However, she survived only about five weeks after her second operation. It was so pathetic when her husband and mother would come to visit, for they knew her condition. It really hurts me to watch a patient slowly die, and to see the deep grief of the relatives.
What is particularly sad is when patients feel they are going to live, and are planning for something in the future, but you know that all the evidence show they are going to die. You try to hide your feelings—you have to at times. Once in a while I just have to get out of the room.
Not only are such cases sad, but some are frustrating as well. I remember a patient, about fifty years old, at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Brooklyn. Two weeks before, he suffered a severe heart attack. But now he was really getting along well. He was such a fine man; he never complained and was always cooperative. Everyone on the floor liked him.
This particular morning, I shaved him, gave him his bath, and he was sitting up in bed eating. He looked so good. The doctor came in, examined him, and told him that he was doing fine. But then, all of a sudden, he called for me. I immediately went over and asked him, “What’s wrong?” All he could whisper was, “Miss B————.” Then he fell back, unconscious.
This all happened without any warning. Within seconds the emergency oxygen equipment was applied to revive him. But it was useless; he was dead. I had worked so hard nursing him and was sure he was going to recover. I really felt the loss. And then right afterward his wife came in, and I had to try to comfort her. Nursing can be like that; some of it is not easy to take.
Satisfaction and Joys
But, on the other hand, nursing can give real satisfaction; it affords an opportunity to help people, to give them a little comfort. Why does one take up this profession? It should be to help people, to make them feel a little more comfortable in their illness or dying state. That is the way I have always felt.
Nursing also affords moments of real excitement and joy, especially when a patient is saved from almost certain death. I can remember a case soon after I began nursing in Jamaica. I was working in the hospital in Montego Bay when a local tailor was seriously hurt. Apparently, a door had slammed, driving deep into his chest a long sewing needle that he kept in his shirt.
When he was brought to the hospital he was gasping for breath. X rays were quickly taken. They revealed that the needle point was actually touching his heart, but it did not go through. Immediately the operation was begun. An incision was made over the heart, and I could actually see the exposed heart. The needle was taken out, and the man lived! It really thrilled me to be part of that operating team that saved his life! Since then, I have had this joy a number of times.
On another occasion I was working in the operating room of that same hospital. Two boys, both about ten years old, had been on their way to school when a truck hit them, squeezing them against an earthen bank. The chest cavity of one of the boys was split apart, exposing his heart and lungs; the leg of the other child was seriously damaged.
I was waiting in the operating room when the ambulance crew delivered them. As soon as they arrived, I began cutting their clothes from the wounds. It was frightening, actually to see that one boy’s exposed heart pulsating! I did not see how he could possibly live. But quickly the doctors began an hours-long operation. They cleaned out the chest cavity, sewed up the inside ruptures, packed the cavity with antibiotics, and closed the massive wound. For months I nursed that boy. And he recovered completely!
Patients’ Gratitude
It is certainly an encouragement when patients who have been nursed back to health say: “You saved my life. Thank you so much!” Over the years a number have told me that. This helps to make nursing, despite its difficulties, seem worthwhile.
Many former patients still keep in touch with me. One Jewish lady, for example, never fails to write when she goes on vacation. She was really a difficult patient. In two weeks, she had eighteen nurses! Nobody stayed with her but me. I find that you can be firm, but kind, with patients, and they usually respond.
I really have sympathy for my patients. That is why I like bedside nursing; I can expend myself more to make people feel that living is really worthwhile. Of course, not everyone expresses gratitude, but I know that people appreciate consideration and kindness, especially when they are sick.
My mother once told me that, when she was riding a bus in Jamaica, she overheard two women discussing a nurse. They were saying how kind she was to them while they were in the hospital and what she did for them. And then one of them mentioned the nurse’s name—my name. My mother was so surprised she turned around and said: “That’s my daughter!”
My Decision to Be a Nurse
How I became interested in nursing is rather unusual. While I was on vacation in Montego Bay, I went with a friend to the hospital to visit a girl recovering from an appendix operation. It was a beautiful place, with a view overlooking the bay. I told the girl that if I should ever be operated on, I would like to come to this hospital and have the same bed she was on.
Well, that was on a Sunday. And the following Saturday I was there as an emergency case. And I got the same bed, in the same room, and I was operated on by the same doctor for the same thing, removal of my appendix.
It was while I was lying there recovering that the thought first came to me that being a nurse would be an interesting profession. I thought to myself, “I am surely ignorant about my physical body, my anatomy.” I wanted to know more about how the body worked, so I decided to become a nurse.
Nurse’s Training
Right after I graduated from secondary school I applied for nurse’s training. We had a choice of places to go for training, so I selected that beautiful hospital in Montego Bay, and I was accepted there.
Our training consisted chiefly of on-the-job nursing. We started working in the hospital wards the first week we arrived. We were called probationers. To distinguish us from the regular nurses who wore all white, we wore a blue uniform with a white apron and black stockings.
We had to be on the job in the hospital at 6 a.m. and we worked until 6 p.m.—with some time off during the day. In the evenings we studied nursing. But except for two or three hours of class instruction, our days were devoted to actual nursing.
Experienced nurses taught us to give patients baths, enemas and injections, to change dressings, to take blood pressure, and so forth; and then under their watchful eye we did these procedures ourselves. We even learned to do things that only doctors are permitted to do in the United States. For example, if a person cut open his arm or leg, we would not call a doctor to care for this but would sew up the wound ourselves. Only if it was a head wound, or was very serious, would a doctor be needed.
Today, however, girls in nurse’s training in some places study nursing mostly from books; they learn the theory, but often get very little practice. Some graduate nurses I have seen did not even know how to give an injection. One college-trained nurse, although able to recite the details of eight varieties of enemas, admitted that she had never actually given a single one!
Trials and Pressures
There is a big difference between reading about nursing from a book, and actually doing it. I will never forget, in about my second week of training, that a nurse told me to put back the dentures in a woman who had just died. I thought that I would die. I started to cry. But the nurse made me do it.
Watching our first postmortem, or autopsy, was also horrifying. We were all sick that night. I could not eat or sleep. The picture of those internal organs being held up by the doctor for us to identify was too vivid in my mind! But I had wanted to learn about anatomy and, I must say, I did.
For my second year of training, I was transferred to the general public hospital in Kingston, the capital. There I worked in a ward for patients with tropical diseases, caring mostly for typhoid patients. The third and final year of our training passed quickly. Now, whether we were recognized as professional nurses depended on passing the final exams. In one test we had to sit before a panel of doctors and answer any questions they might ask. Also, as a practical test I had to check urine for its sugar content, with doctors watching me do it! I was so nervous, my hands were shaking, but I passed. I was now a professional or registered nurse.
Training to Be a Midwife
However, before going to work as a registered nurse, I took a six-month course in midwifery at Kingston’s Victoria Jubilee Hospital. We had to deliver at least forty babies and pass a stiff exam before qualifying as a licensed midwife.
I will never forget my first delivery. It was terrible! I thought that I was going to deliver a live set of twins, but they were macerated. They came out in my hands dead. I was frightened to death!
In our training we were taught to deal with all kinds of abnormal births. For example, instead of coming out headfirst, as is normal, a baby will at times emerge feet first, hand first or at some other angle. We learned how to deliver these babies, and I have since delivered many of them successfully, without complications. Also, the umbilical cord sometimes gets wrapped around the baby’s neck, and we were taught what to do when this occurs.
However, in particular we learned how to maneuver the child in the process of delivery, so that the mother is not torn during birth. It is the standard practice among many doctors to slit the mother, deliver the baby, and sew up the incision. They do this operation, called an episiotomy, because it is easier. But a trained midwife can, in almost all cases, deliver a baby without doing this cutting to enlarge the mother’s opening. In the hundreds of babies, I have delivered, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of episiotomies I have needed to do.
For several years I nursed in Jamaica, serving as a midwife, training student nurses, and doing other hospital work. Then in 1958 I came to New York.
Lack of Caution and Care
Up until three years ago, when I began doing clinic work, I did bedside nursing in Brooklyn hospitals. True, anyone can make a mistake, but at times I have been appalled by the lack of caution and care exercised by both doctors and nurses. I know of a number of instances where patients that were operated on have had instruments or towels left inside them.
There was, for example, a patient in Brooklyn for whom I cared about five or six years ago. On returning home from the hospital after an abdominal operation she complained of severe pains. Her husband got angry with her, telling her that she was all right, but she kept complaining. So, they brought her back to the hospital and took X rays. Inside her were the doctor’s forceps!
Certain doctors, it seems to me, are really careless or negligent. For example, they are supposed to run a number of tests on a patient before an operation, including an EKG to test the heart, X rays, and so forth. But I know of instances when they have failed to do this, with serious consequences.
One patient that I nursed at a Brooklyn hospital had fallen and broken her elbow. That is all. They took her to the operating room to set it. After administering anesthesia, she went into a cardiac arrest—her heart began to fail—they had to do open-heart surgery right then and there. She died, after several days, without ever regaining consciousness. But if the tests had been run, they would have known her heart condition and could have taken precautions.
Things like that happen more often than one may realize. I know because I have seen them happen, and so have friends of mine who work in hospitals here in New York. It is sad to say, but many of the nurses and doctors nowadays just do not seem to be interested in the patient’s welfare. Rather, they are interested mainly in the money they can make—their salary.
Quite a number of times, when I have relieved nurses, I have had to call their attention to the way they have left a patient. The patient was not comfortable; the nurse had not changed his bed, gotten him up for a little exercise, given him a bath, and so forth. All they had done was wipe his face with a damp cloth. And that is not the way to nurse!
In recent years it has made me sick to my stomach to see the negligence of nurses, which I am convinced has led to the death of patients who otherwise might have lived. I have observed patients in discomfort ring and ring their bell. But the nurses just sit at their desk and do not answer. All they seem to be interested in is their smoking and personal comfort.
Of course, I know this is not true in all hospitals. Not all nurses or doctors are this way. In fact, I feel that most of them are not. But there is definitely a trend toward self-interest rather than patient-interest, and I have heard other doctors and nurses also express dismay over this.
Abortion and Blood Transfusions
I believe that the wholesale killing of unborn babies in New York hospitals is just another example of the deterioration going on today. What is happening is so disgusting that some city hospitals are having trouble getting nurses to work in their abortion clinics.
The recent New York abortion law permits an abortion up to twenty-four weeks after conception, by which time the fetus is easily recognizable as a human creature with distinctive parts. Some aborted fetuses have even lived! But nurses have been told to let others die. A registered nurse wrote something very interesting about this matter in a nursing magazine. She said:
“Moral considerations aside, at present an unborn child is considered by law a person: he is given rights to inheritance, court suit for prenatal damages . . . Thus, a woman has no more right to kill her unborn child than she has to batter, abuse, or kill him after birth.”—American Journal of Nursing, December 1970.
In the clinic where I work, dozens of girls a week come in for abortions. Some have had two abortions within just a few months! I think the doctors are chiefly to blame, for they could refuse these girls. But it is a booming business, and I think that doctors are interested mainly in the money. Personally, I will have nothing to do with abortions; not even the paperwork in connection with them. My conscience will not allow it.
I take a similar position in connection with blood transfusions. I have seen patients sicken with hepatitis from the blood they receive. Some never recover. Also, some patients are killed by circulatory overload and other adverse reactions to transfusions. So, rather than being lifesaving, I know that transfusions can be death-dealing. Some doctors I know of are beginning to use blood less and less.
What Nursing Helped Me to Appreciate
I have learned a lot from nursing. For one thing, it has helped me to appreciate how marvelously designed the physical body is. It is indeed the handiwork of a Grand Creator. It was soon after I began my nursing career that something happened that really made me think about this.
I was working one night in the operating room in Jamaica when a little girl was rushed in by her frightened parents. She had swallowed an English halfpenny that stuck in her larynx. X rays revealed that mucus was forming around the coin, and since it could not be extracted through her mouth, an immediate operation was necessary. But just as we were about to begin, the power went out. So, while I held a flashlight the doctor went ahead with that very delicate operation.
As I watched, I could not help but marvel. I can remember thinking at the time, ‘Look at those fingers. They are so skilled! Really, shouldn’t we be God-fearing?’ Because of the doctor’s God-given fingers that little girl was saved.
But often nothing that either doctors or nurses can do can keep a patient from dying. I have known many times that helpless feeling when death would claim another victim. Often, I wondered, ‘Why do humans have to suffer and die? Is it really God’s purpose that people die like this?’
I am so happy that I was moved to seek an answer, and that I was helped to appreciate God’s grand purpose to establish a new system of things, wherein “death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore.
