I was having a normal day at work yesterday...the usual getting all gowned up for a Cdiff patient and bringing 25 out the 26 supplies I needed into the room. Weaned off some pressers only to have to put them back on again. Seeing a dear patient that isn't making progress. It was sort of getting me down for a few hours.
Then my patients wife came in to visit. She shared her husbands story with me and it almost brought me to tears, as a nurse and a normal human :)
Her husband suffered multiple medical problems in the last year putting him in the hospital, where he then suffered from several heart attacks and strokes. Everyone wrote him off. He had a stage 4 pressure ulcer you could stick your fist in. He was sent to hospice to ease him from the pain of what he was going through.
Then...
He didn't get worse. He got better bit by bit. His wife was there, turning him, dressing his wound, applying Dakins solution (which is pretty much just bleach), toileting him for weeks. He was moved out of hospice into a rehab and was transferred to us for heart surgery. When I saw him yesterday, we got him out of bed and he popped right up like he didn't spend the last year almost on his death bed. His pressure ulcer? Healed. Completely. We transferred him out of the ICU yesterday. His wife showed me her catalog of iPhone pictures from the last 11 months showing his acute decline and steady and slow progress back to a strong, independent man. Back to his wife of over 30 years.
Those kind of stories make me come back for more, day after day, week after week. Even though we are understaffed every day and night, even though we trudge through hospital politics sometimes just to care for our patients. Even though sometimes you feel like you aren't making a difference for anyone, anywhere sometimes. It makes me proud to put those scrubs on and introduce myself as the nurse to my patients every morning.
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