Sonny Kleinfield - Becoming a Nurse

M ASTERS AT W ORK

B ECOMING A N EUROSURGEON

B ECOMING A V ETERINARIAN

B ECOMING A V ENTURE C APITALIST

B ECOMING A H AIRSTYLIST

B ECOMING A R EAL E STATE A GENT

B ECOMING A M ARINE B IOLOGIST

B ECOMING AN E THICAL H ACKER

B ECOMING A L IFE C OACH

B ECOMING A Y OGA I NSTRUCTOR

B ECOMING A R ESTAURATEUR

B ECOMING A P RIVATE I NVESTIGATOR

ALSO AVAILABLE

B ECOMING A B AKER

B ECOMING A S OMMELIER

B ECOMING A C URATOR

B ECOMING AN A RCHITECT

B ECOMING A F ASHION D ESIGNER

B ECOMING A S PORTS A GENT

B ECOMING AN I NTERIOR D ESIGNER

B ECOMING A F IREFIGHTER

B ECOMING A V IDEO G AME D ESIGNER

B ECOMING A M IDWIFE

B ECOMING A T EACHER

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Jacket design by Alison Forner

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-4241-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-4242-1 (ebook)

This book was reported and written some months before the COVID-19 outbreak began stealing innocent lives, barricading the world, and testing the capabilities and very soul of the health care system as never before. Nurses are heroes every day. But if there was ever any doubt about their unshakable courage and their indispensable role in fixing the sick, those attributes have been accentuated during every minute of this horrific ordeal. And so this book is dedicated with heartfelt gratitude to all the brave nurses fighting the coronavirus.

H e arrived in a wheelchair. Paramedics hustled him in from the ambulance bay, steering him into the sharp light. His face was serious. His eyes jumped left and right, taking in the unfamiliar setting. There was a steadfast procession of such arrivals swerving into the hospital, thickening as the day lengthened. With this man, something was wrong, but it wasnt clear how wrong. All visits to this fast-motion environment were stories with yet unknown endings.

Nurses were coming and going. Doctors were coming and going. Noise was high: the staccato of beeping heart monitors; alarms ringing; phones chirping; the clank of wheeled beds being moved. The grumble and moaning of people and murmurs of misery were catapulting off the walls. And that vivid smell. The pungent disinfectant hospital smell, day in and day out, always the same.

Few places stir up as much drama as rooms like this. Walking in, you feel an electric nervousness that never passes, the nervous flutter of sickness. Patients, with their omnivorous needs, seek its alchemy. The emergency room.

A woman came over to inspect the man in the wheelchair. Her name was Hadassah Lampert. She was thirty-three and a registered nurse, and this was Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City. Every day, Lampert met strangers in pain, and their pain became her concern. Now this mans breathing, his oxygen level, his blood pressure, his heartbeat, the sensation in his face and his limbs, whether he was agreeable or surly, hungry or full, whether, in fact, he lived or diedthey were her concern.

He had a trimmed beard on an angular face. Short, dusky hair. Hound dog eyes. Sinewy. He was forty-nine. He wore a baseball cap and had his sunglasses perched on the brim. While she took his vitals, Lampert noticed that he was listing to the left. He told her he had been on the way to worka blue-collar jobwhen he felt dizzy and collapsed on the subway.

Okay, youre going to come over here and lie on the stretcher, she told him.

Helping him transfer over, she noticed that his gait was uneven. She focused hard on him and considered her options. She called a stroke code.

A stroke code was a speeded-up regimen, an auto racing pit stop. A retinuetwo nurses, a technician, an ER doctor, a neurologist, a nurse practitioner from neurology, someone from pharmacyquickly assembled. Lampert economically filled in one of the doctors on the particulars.

The doctor asked the man, Were you having difficulty walking?

Yes.

What does it feel like?

Like things are moving.

The doctor asked him to touch his fingers together.

Can you go with your finger and touch your nose. A little off.

Can you touch the tip of your nose?

Look at my nose. How many fingers do you see?

The patient held up two.

How many fingers? the doctor asked.

One.

How many?

Two.

What month are we in?

September.

How old are you?

Forty-nine.

Lampert escorted him to get a CAT scan of his brain. She and a male nurse hoisted him onto the exam table.

After the table slid into the big doughnut hole, Lampert and the others positioned themselves around the screen in the control room, the space limited, and stared stonily at the interior of the mans head. No discernable issues. Puzzled looks were swapped. Weird, the neurologist said, jutting a finger at the image. This didnt happen overnight. Im thinking seizure. Maybe he had a tooth issue.

Lampert mentioned that he had had sinusitis, inflamed sinuses. They decided to do an MRI.

While Lampert tended to the man, a young woman awaiting her discharge instructions loped past in her chilly gown, wailing, Im telling you, I need to get a life.

In the gathering day, beds were filling up, patients squeezing into the maximized space. A maintenance person was mopping up a dusting of blood from a dripping patient, doing it casually as if cleaning up after a mixer at a reunion, guiding visitors around the freckled area. A patient experience volunteer toured the room cradling a highly sociable toy poodle. She whisked it from bed to bed for occupants to pet. Hi, this is Twitter, she announced. He weighs three pounds. I put him on a diet if he gains weight. The nurses fussed over him too, appreciating his calming effect.

Among its patchery of cases that morning, the ER had a fall, flank pain, chest pain, suicidal ideation, shortness of breath, rectal bleeding, foreign bodies in the eye, altered medical state, weaknessthe various betrayals of the body. There was a fidgety, caterwauling man who couldnt keep his feet still and glanced over his right shoulder about every nanosecond. At one point, he appeared to be having a conversation with an IV pole. A whimpering woman roughed up by her husband was being interviewed at her bedside by two cops.