I have to run off and shoot another one
of those TV shows again in a few minutes, so I'm gonna leave you with
something I wrote three and a half years ago. I suppose, considering
what's going on in Marquette yesterday and today, that it's kind of
appropriate, even if the names and situations have changed a bit.
But I still feel the same. There's
absolutely no doubt about that.
Have a great weekend. And if you get
yourself a three day weekend, enjoy every second of it!
*****
(as originally posted 4/2/14):
I have now come to realize who some of
the greatest people on this planet are.
They're nurses.
Like I was saying yesterday, both
Loraine and I have been incredibly lucky in that until last week
we've never had to deal with a hospital situation. So when Loraine
was admitted Wednesday and we walked through the doors of Marquette
General, we had no idea what to expect. I mean, sure, we've seen a
lot of TV shows sets in hospital, and we've visited people who've
been in the hospital, but neither of us ever had to be the person who
was admitted.
That, of course, all changed thanks to
Loraine's gall bladder.
Almost from the first moment we were
there, the nursing staff amazed us, not only with their ability to
handle several thousand things at once, but also with the way they're
able to connect with their patients and make those patients feel at
ease despite the fact that they're in one of the most stressful of
places. They did everything they could to ease Loraine's pain, they
laughed at my nervous attempts at jokes, and they answered every
single question thrown at them (and trust me, they had a LOT of
questions thrown at them). Just because of that, I'm forever
thankful to them, but it was in other ways they earned my amazement
and my respect.
As we both joked, for a patient Loraine
was very “low maintenance”. Sure, she was in pain and sure, she
wanted to get out of there, but she was still quite functional, both
mentally and physically. It was when the nurses on the sixth floor
had to deal with patients that weren't “functional” that my eyes
were opened to just what amazing people they are. For a time on her
third night there, Loraine had to share her room with a woman brought
in from elsewhere in the U.P., a woman who was suffering from (among
other things) dementia. Even though she kept asking the same
questions over and over, the nurses would patiently answer them.
When she got agitated and wanted to leave, the nurses explained why
she couldn't. And when she turned angry and confrontational (as
people suffering from dementia often do), they handled her with a
care and a sensitivity that, if I had to guess, very few people could
muster.
Every time I stopped by to visit
Loraine I took note of what the nurses were doing. Some were
performing high-end (at least high-end to me) medical functions,
while others were just trying to make their patients feel comfortable
with clean sheets or a warm wipe. And while I'm sure they do among
themselves, I never once heard them complain around a patient about
what they had to do, even when those patients, through no fault of
their own, have made a mess. They just went about doing what needed
to get done to make the people under their care feel as comfortable
as possible.
And I don't think a lot of people could
manage to do that.
So if anything good has come out of
this situation, it's that my eyes have been opened. I didn't realize
it before, but I will now never forget. Nurses, among them the ones
on the sixth floor at Marquette General, are among the most kind,
caring, and special people on the planet, and at every opportunity,
they deserve to hear these two words--
Thank you.
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