Happy nurses week, as if a week is enough to celebrate all the nurses out there doing an amazing kick ass job saving lives.
Thank you for all you do, as a doctor, I am not brave enough to do what you do. Nurses are the essential glue that holds the medical team together. Doctors can run around giving orders all day long, but it is the nurse who never leaves the bed side or the hand of the patient.
Nurses are the vital eyes and ears to the team and know the pulse of what’s going on at the bed side. I have had too many great encounters to verify this. I remember one night as a new intern, nervous to be the night call doc for the whole hospital by myself. I asked my senior as he was walking out the door “ what do I do if the nurse calls me about a patient?” Their reply :” Ask the nurse what they would do, because I guarantee they have more experience than you !” And he walked out. And he was right.
I never forgot that advice. Years later I still tell that to the newbies on their first night along with “ Do what you know and not what you dont”
A doctors credit is shared equally with the nurse. Every time I have been able to help a patient in the hospital it is because a nurse got me there in some fashion. A nurse is one who will stop eating lunch and can run to a code and help bring someone back from the dead to the land of the living and calmly go back to eating their lunch.
A nurse takes the heat from the patient and turns the other cheek. a nurse will do whatever it takes to help the care of the patient in all aspects.
Respect and thank you to all the nurses in every division of medicine and surgery.
You leave a heart print wherever you go.
…………….
I love you
