I'm grateful for the uproar from
nurses following the comments on The View and wanted to add my own thoughts on
being a nurse and using a doctor’s stethoscope:
I wear my stethoscope around my neck every shift. It's a weight that I wear proudly because I've earned the privilege to use it. The privilege to listen to the lungs and heartbeat of a newborn baby, the privilege to care for these moms, babies, and families every day when I go to work. I use that stethoscope to assess my patients, mom and baby, I listen to their lungs, heart, bowel sounds, I take their blood pressure, I check their reflexes, and the doctors that I work with often use my stethoscope too, the one off my neck, the one with Bridget Quinn, RN engraved on it. It's an important tool that I couldn't do my job as a nurse without. There are a few other things required not only to do my job, but to do it well. My hands, critical thinking skills, compassion, resourcefulness, stamina, resilience, education, just to name a few.
My hands have been squeezed through
contractions, scratched through pushing, they have wiped away blood, sweat, and
tears, they have delivered babies into this world and they have held babies as
they leave us, they have started IVs, placed Foley catheters, started and
stopped chest compressions, they administer medications, they find the heartbeat
of an unborn baby, they check cervixes, and they hold the hand of patients and
families through the best and worst times of their lives.
As a nurse, you quite literally are
holding lives in your hands, you better have expert critical thinking skills,
you better know all the tricks to get that positional IV running, to turn that
OP baby, to convince that mom that she can when she swears she can't, you
better be able to make it through your 12-hour turned 17-hour night shift, and
you better be ready to come back the next night to do it all over again. As
nurses, we are all those things, we are the most trusted profession, and we
hold a strong commitment to our patients because we love what we do. It takes a
special kind of person to do the job of a nurse, to be a nurse. I know because
I am one and because I hear from many people quite often that they could never
do some of the things myself and my colleagues do. That may be true for some
but for myself and the other many million nurses in the world I could not
imagine doing anything else.
#nursesunite
