Echo Heron - Tending Lives: Nurses on the Medical Front

TENDING LIVES

With candor, humor, and sensitivity, Tending Lives reveals what nurses witness and sustain on a daily basis. From birth to death, extreme despair to triumph, these nurses bravery, heart, and unwavering commitment shine through.

Palo Alto Daily News

INTENSIVE CARE

Shockingly believable Intensive Care chronicles the voyage of an idealistic nursing student through the gritty realities of practice with humor and a fine eye for detail.

The Washington Post

Compelling reading.

New York Daily News

CONDITION CRITICAL

An uncompromising and often visionary sequel to her bestseller, Intensive Care.

San Francisco Chronicle

Heron gives a voice to her fellow nurses (a savvy, wisecracking, take-no-guff voice) and turns them into real people.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

An Ivy Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1998 by Echo Heron

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ivy Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Ivy Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-93422

eISBN: 978-0-307-56053-7

v3.1

I have written this book to describe for the reader the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of many different nurses and other healthcare providers in many different situations. I have borrowed from true incidents and have based many of the scenes contained in this book on the real life events that I have seen or the contributors have described to me.

With the exception of the individuals named in the chapter about the Oklahoma City bombing, and me, I have used fictitious names and characteristics for all the patients, family members, doctors and other healthcare providers, hospitals, schools, and institutions portrayed here. In some cases I have also combined characteristics of individuals and have altered the chronology and place of events. Thus, this book is not intended to record events as historical fact, nor is it meant to focus criticism on any particular group, individual, or institution. Any resemblances the reader may imagine they discern are unintended and entirely coincidental.

These are the nurses who openly shared themselves and their world to make this book possible. They are the true authors.

I am deeply grateful to each of them.

From my heartthank you.

Jacqueline C. Baldwin
Sue Blaisdell
Sarah Broecker
Katharine Cranwell
Steve Dee
LeNai Dohr
Dee Flanagan
Chris A. Floden
Kathleen C. Heron
L. Hinds
Bonnie G. Jacks
Mark Kobe
Kaye Manly-Hayes
Betsy Mazzoleni
Rita McClain
Bruce E. McLaughlin
Kathy Morelli
Laurel Nickerson
Courtney E. Nield
Terry Patrick
Lauren Rachow
Peter Ramme
Barbara Resnick
Zack Rinderer
Christine Lindstrom Schaeffer
Dana Scholl
Deena Scintilla
Kathy Sinnett
Jill Sproul
Sharon Squires
Harold Stearley
Jane Ramenofsky Stewart
Linda Stone
Elizabeth Vito
Georgia R. White
Janet R. Williams
And all those who wish to remain anonymous

I believe that when a person becomes a nurse, they sign on for life. It doesnt seem to matter for how long, or in what branch of nursing one works; there is a certain qualitya spirit, a depth of soulwhich is unique to the nurse.

At the risk of causing the elite of nursings professional societies and academia to clench and grind their teeth, I also believe nursing is a calling, in that nurses possess an abundance of compassionthe wisdom born of the heart. Indeed, one of the basic rewards of nursing is the fulfillment which comes from the knowledge that one has made a positive, often profound, difference in anothers life.

Nursing is most certainly a world unto itself. Nurses are the nitty-gritty of hands-on people. Those who choose this profession are not the type who shrink from adversity; they are as frontline as frontline gets. Lets face itpeople dont go through all those years of education and specialized training if they faint at the sight of blood, shrink from death, suffering, disease, overbearing doctors, and go squeamish at the thought of being smeared with various bodily fluids and solids.

What nurses witness and get involved with on a daily basisdeath, birth, extreme despair, suffering, life-altering trauma, extreme joy, rage, diseaseare phenomena most normal people experience only a few times during an entire lifetime. In the course of their typical workday, nurses deal with mostsometimes allof those events.

The idea for this book came to me early one morning as I sat listening to a group of nurses swap nurse stories. These were the kind of true medical tales which enthralled nonmedical personnel (normal people) and kept them riveted to their seats. I had written two books about my own experiences in nursingwhy not broaden the brush and add more colors to the palette? I would invite nurses from every branch of nursing to share themselves and their storiesallow normal people in behind the closed doors and let them walk around in the nurses shoes for a chapter or two.

Thinking in terms of This is gonna be a piece of cake! I took out ads in national nursing journals, newspaper classifieds, and the Web. So absolutely sure was I that I would receive an overwhelming response, I envisioned my local post office calling me to say that I needed a four-wheel-drive truck to pick up the hundreds of sacks of letters. Id already decided to organize them by state and then by branch of nursing. Too, I calculated, it would probably require a full week just to download all the E-mail, let alone read and print it out.

Excuse me while I clear my throat and choke.

After three months, I had received a total of sixteen responses, not including those from my nurse friends whom Id harangued on a daily basis. Eleven of the sixteen replies were from nurses claiming to be writing the same book. Of the remaining five, one upbraided me for exploiting the profession, one was from a physician wanting to know if he could get in on the act, two were legitimate, and one was from someone clearly not from anywhere on this planet or even California.

Time for new tactics. I sent copies of my ad to various nurse acquaintances asking them to post them in the nurses lounges of every unit, ward, and medical floor of every hospital, clinic, and nursing registry in their area. Soon it was reported to me that within twenty minutes to twenty-four hours of posting, the ad would be taken down by management, and the warning issued that any nurse who replied to that ad would be suspended.

Because I had a difficult time believing this, I personally took that ad around to my local hospitals. Surely something so benign as wanting to interview nurses about their experiences couldnt be seen as a threat to management.

Again, give me a moment while I cough up a hair ball of navet.

The routine went something like this: Id present myself to the director of nurses or one of the nurse managers, and as soon as they understood who I was and what I was trying to do, they would, one, start shaking their heads while they showed me the way out of the building; two (my favorite), tell me they did not want their nurses involved in any project which involved nurses discussing nursing, because it was unethical and in conflict with the interests of the administration and nursing in general; or three, laugh in my face and tell me to get real, get moving, and get lost before they called security. God forbid the spotlight of recognition should fall on nursing.