A hospital Emergency Department is a living, breathing and relentless force to be reckoned with, unless you are a nurse. If you’re a nurse, you stare it square in the face and tell it to move because, frankly, there are more important things than its melodramatic performance.
People are ill or injured and they need to be treated, or they are dying and they need to be saved.
A doctor’s order of fluids, thinners and vaso-whatevers floats in the air until a nurse wrangles it and acts. Beds are not turned and procedures do not happen unless a nurse is behind it.
There would be no X-rays, lab results or EKGs to be read if nurses were not steadying the pace of patients seen.
Without nurses, no one would know the patient in bed 3 doesn’t want family around during their psychiatric consult.
The 5-year-old boy with the broken arm waiting for orthopedics was riding his new red skateboard that he got for his birthday; only his nurse will know that.
And the girl with cerebral palsy in the waiting room with a chief complaint of increased general weakness; she’s been here twice in the past week. Her mom and dad have been arguing more and more. Only the nurses know that if you get that patient alone and talk to her about sunflowers, she’ll hold herself upright and will continue to do so until you can re-train her parents on correctly dosing her medication.
Nurses are warriors.
“TFA male, ETA 5 minutes,” the charge nurse’s voice echoes over the intercom.
TFA: traumatic full arrest. Physicians, nurses, technicians and students rush to the trauma bays. IV drips and blood transfusions. What seems like an entire pharmacy is prepared inside that 20-foot-by-20-foot clean, cold cubicle.
The ambulance sirens blare, and the automatic doors are forced open by the team of firefighters and paramedics in their third round of CPR.
“All the way to end,” one nurse directs the stampede, while another notices blood pooling on the gurney and grabs packing to stop the bleeding.
With the resident physician at the head of the bed calling for rounds of drugs to be pushed, one nurse starts an IV, another speaks with the police and another charts the entire scene behind the computer at the left of the room.
The intercom interrupts, “charge nurse to radio room!” One of the nurses writing down the epinephrine doses hands the pen to a nurse standing by and walks back down the hallway. A minute later, “critical female, ETA 10 minutes” is announced.
I have watched a nurse administer pain medication to a patient while holding the baby of a mother from a car wreck and consulting on a wound dressing over the phone. I have watched a woman collapse from alcohol withdrawal and two nurses come from what seemed to be the walls to break her fall with a gurney.
Nurses have asked me what kind of pizza I wanted on a slow Sunday night. During the late Friday night surge, I’ve watched nurses argue with dispatch to stop accepting traumas when our waiting room swelled.
I am in complete awe of nurses. To me, their magic is stronger than any fear in any patient room. Their resilience and understanding is more powerful than anything from a syringe.
Nurses guide departments to success. I have never been in any other environment like this. They are warriors, and I would follow them into battle every time.
— Noozhawk intern Sophia Spann graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in biological sciences. While in college, she managed multiple clinical research studies in the Emergency Department at UC Irvine Medical Center, where she currently works as a medical scribe while she applies to medical school. She is also an alumna of Santa Barbara High School. Contact her at news@noozhawk.com. The opinions expressed are her own.