Debbie Moore-Black is a nurse who blogs at Do Not Resuscitate.
1986. I graduated from LPN to RN. And I was immediately offered a new job. Manager of a six-bed ER.
This hospital had three surgical suites — 50 inpatient beds and 2 L&D suites. This was a private Catholic hospital run by the nuns. The computer system was new and a foreign object.
Sister Ursula* (name changed) of medical records was so overwhelmed by the volume of paper charts that she hid …
I never have a problem going to sleep. In fact, after I work a night shift, I easily go into a semi-coma. But tonight is different. 2 days off from work, with a regular sleep schedule at night, but my mind is twirling. I can’t sleep.
So at 3 a.m., I took a shower. Took an ibuprofen with some ginger ale. And I started to drift back to Catholic elementary school. …
I had to earn my “stripes” in ICU. After I graduated from nursing school, the “big” hospitals wouldn’t take me into the ICU, as I had no experience as an ICU nurse. Back in the early 1980s, there was no such thing as an internship program.
I desperately wanted to become an ICU nurse. So a small-town county hospital took me in. It was a six-bed “ICU,” and I slowly learned …
She was naked in her seclusion room — a padded cell — with her gown on the floor and drenched in her urine.
I was her nurse.
I gave her lithium.
She put the pill in her mouth and then spit it at me in my face. Then her tirade began:
“I’m Jesus. The FBI is watching us. The computer chip in my head said to kill, kill, kill you.
They’re watching me. They’re watching …
They scream and holler and march. Open up the U.S. This is a hoax.
Coronavirus is deadly.
Invisible as the virus makes its trek across our U.S. Across the universe.
Nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists are being named heroes. Signs and banners and free meals and cookies and doughnuts and loads of adoration come our way.
But we don’t want to be named a hero. We are doing our job, our profession, our …
Our 23 bed ICU has been converted to COVID-19 patients. All of them.
I want to tell myself this is science fiction, but it’s not. It’s real. And we are scared.
As I enter the unit to start my night shift, we have a huddle of the off-going and oncoming nurses.
We are committed to fighting this invisible monster.
After a brief update of all of our patients, we bow our heads and say …
No break for 12 hours.
We beg to go to the bathroom just for a nano-second. You know, in between not skipping a beat to hang life-saving IV drips, assisting with central line insertions and arterial lines and intubations of the sickest.
We pretty much just go door to door literally saving lives.
Code blues, and chest compressions and emergent intubations and rapid response team screams out overhead, as we are responsible for …
We were told to wear masks before entering this patient’s ICU room. Entering his room, you could smell his rotting flesh. He was 92 years old.
His skin would slough off if you dared to bathe him.
His decubitus ulcers were raging with infection.
As long as I’ve been an ICU nurse, this was the worst — the smell, the neglect, the disrespect for this man.
He was VIP status.
I always had a problem …
She was new to this ICU. She was young, smart, funny, and considered one of the “cool” nurses.
Before we could really get to know her, she exposed her wonderful, fantastic, perfect life all over social media.
Their perfect two-story brick house, their two little, perfect angel daughters — the perfect life in the perfect town.
But what was most important was her perfect, handsome husband. He was bound to be a self-employed …
The brother I never knew.
He was buried in an unmarked grave with other dead babies. 1960.
I am now the age my mother died. She was 64 years old: colon cancer.
She was a vacant, negligent mother.
During one of my psychology classes in nursing school, we learned about the baby monkey experiment (the Harlow experiment), where a baby monkey was laid against a mother made of wires. It was an inanimate object …
I walk out my front door today to do my obligatory walk around the block with my pups.
Two police cars with blue lights flashing, lead a caravan of over 100 motorcyclists to a funeral for one of their fallen brothers. They revved up their motors in the procession, I guess, as a sign of love, of brotherhood, of kindred spirits in the motorcycle world.
I choked up. I was ready to …
Smoking was cool. And he started smoking at the age of 15. Two packs a day — every day.
When he was 32 years old, we had our first-born son. And he decided to quit cold turkey.
But the damage was done.
Somehow, someway, it would catch up with him in devastating ways.
By the time my husband was 66 years old, he developed shortness of breath and chest pain. With exertion and without …
My anger rises when I see the TV “nurse” with her short white dress and her breasts spilling over her pronounced cleavage and her submissive voice speaking to this muscular male MD.
Her quick giggle and pretentious demeanor is a stereotype portrayed across the land. And the reality of what we really do goes unnoticed.
We have people shouting:
“Bring me a coke!”
“A blanket, hurry up!”
“The food is too cold … the food …
All of us nurses and physicians in the ED and ICU knew him well.
He was a young, 21-year-old. A smart, articulate guy who kept going from one hospital to the next. He had a system down … almost.
This young man was a drug seeker. He knew all about seizures and how an Ativan IV push felt during the “seizures” he allegedly was having.
Even though he had several identities and different …
Perfect nurse.
Perfect manager.
Perfect puppet.
An ICU physician once told me: Nurse managers have a life cycle of a mosquito.
Fast and furious
And then gone.
Deleted until the next one shows up.
It was the perfect ICU.
Twenty-five beds.
Dynamic intensivists. Phenomenal.
And they respected us nurses and collaborated with us. We had perfect cerebral perfusion together.
Experienced ICU nurses who knew what to do like clockwork — teaching the younger new nurses. Teaching them the facts of ICU. …
Our 20-bed ICU finally captured 10 intensivists — all board-certified in critical care medicine. We were fortunate enough to have one of these doctors in our ICU 24-7.
Of course, they all practiced professionally with expertise.
But I remembered this one the most: Dr. Jason McKenzie (name changed for privacy).
He easily became our friend and “go-to” person.
Clocking in at night and finding out that Dr. J was our doc, would give me …
If you went to go to a museum in New York City and saw a live heart encased in glass, still pumping and pulsating — it would be my heart, shredded into a thousand pieces all in disarray. But it still would be pulsating. This describes my life as a nurse.
Nursing was a vacuum that sucked me dry and left me dangling with nothing more to give. Three years left …
In 1976, we couldn’t wait to be nurses. Our starched white dresses with the nurse caps and stripes symbolized our graduation status as we were called one by one to receive our diploma and a rose.
We took an oath to care for the sick, to be professional, to critically think, to respect doctors and to respect patients and family members.
And to respect each other.
It was the age before computers. We …
I have to work tonight. It’s Saturday. And I don’t want to go in. It’s springtime, the skies are blue, birds chirping, and the flowers show off their magnificent colors.
But it’s Saturday. And along comes being a nurse. We have mandatory weekends, mandatory holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and Independence Day and Memorial Day.
Mandatory.
And even on my day off when I get a real nights sleep, I think …
I was 5 years old on a busy New York City street with my mom, dad, and two sisters. A large man in shabby clothes holding a garbage bag in his hand stood on the corner waiting for the light to change.
My dad reached into his wallet and handed the stranger a $20 bill, patted him on the shoulder, and said, “Have a good day, my man.”
Dad knew everybody — …
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