Nurses, Ebola, and Manly-Men in Government

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Nurses: ThenSpeak / NowSpeak

 

ThenSpeak: Nurses are honored for risking their lives to heal the sick and wounded.

NowSpeak: She got sick? Must have been her own fault. Punish her.  If she survives.

 

ThenSpeak: When a man sees a nurse, he tips his hat respectfully.

NowSpeak:  When a man sees a nurse, he demands that she not take a trip, shop for groceries, take public transportation, or go anywhere except to work without asking his permission.

 

ThenSpeak: The wise physician always listens to the nurse.

NowSpeak: The wise physician still does.

 

ThenSpeak: Nurses are women.

NowSpeak: Men, many of them combat medics, are nurses too.

 

ThenSpeak: Three-year hospital schools produce generations of professional, well educated registered nurses.

NowSpeak: two-year colleges and four-year universities produce generations of professional and even better educated registered nurses.  In addition, many nurses accomplish master’s degrees and doctorates.

 

ThenSpeak: Nurses are on duty every hour of the day and night.

NowSpeak:  Nurses are still on duty every hour of the day and night.  So what are the staff of the Center for Disease Control doing at 0230 when the sleet is hitting the landing pad, the lights have failed, and the dust-off is yawing in against the wind with wounded aboard?

 

ThenSpeak: Nurses keep up with medical developments through in-service and professional journals; we should listen to them.

NowSpeak: Hey, forget them; we can cure diseases by throwing buckets of water over our heads and wearing little ceramic pins made in China.

 

ThenSpeak:  Nurses often make do with inadequate supplies.

NowSpeak: The CDC budget for 2012 was $7.16 billion (Huffington Post), and nurses still must make do with inadequate supplies.

 

ThenSpeak: Long hours, many demands, low pay.

NowSpeak: Long hours, many demands, low pay, and now under the rule of an Ebola Czar who kinda looks like a frat-boy version of Kim Jong Un and whose only medical qualification is being a pal to the vice-president.  One wonders what his hours, work, and pay are like.

 

ThenSpeak: Nurses are angels in white.

NowSpeak: Nurses are angels in white, in scrubs, in helicopter jumpsuits, and in combat body armor.  They are angels aboard warships, in field units in far-off WhoseDumbIdeaWasThisIstan, on long-distance evacuation aircraft, in foreign and domestic missions, and in great hospitals and in tiny rural clinics.  Nurses have suffered and died in POW camps and have been murdered by their captors.  Nurses are the immediate responders when some poor soul who is hemorrhaging, crying, puking, coughing, screaming, and gasping, possibly drunk or stoned or armed, is pushed through the emergency room door,.

 

So maybe the manly men in Washington and Austin are blaming nurses because the manly men aren’t doing their own jobs.

 

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12.16.2012, "Here I Am"

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“Here I Am”

Last Friday, on a very grim day for this nation, four young women chose to light candles against the darkness, and to say “Here I am” to those who suffer.

Brittany Carroll, Amber Coleson, Samantha Guillory, and Tara Roe-Sanchez took The Nightingale Pledge in a candle-lit ceremony at Jasper’s First United Methodist Church.  As LVN candidates in Angelina College’s nursing program, they have completed the first phase of their classroom studies and practical experience, and now look forward to taking their state board exams.  All intend to work towards the RN.

Brittany Carroll and Samantha Guillory received their caps and pins from their lead instructor, Lisa West, RN, MSN, FNP-C.  Amber Coleson elected Whitney Franklin, RN, BSN, for that honor, and Tara Roe-Sanchez was privileged to be capped and pinned by her mother, Patti Hooks, herself a new RN. 

Sharing the solemn joy were the new nurses’ families, friends, and their other instructors:  Liz Powell, RN, MEd; Charlet Blades, RN, MSN; Jacquelyn McClain, RN, BSN; Winifred Ferguson-Adams, RN, MEd; and Amber Murphy, RN, BSN.

Although many nursing schools have dropped The Nightingale Pledge, along with capping and pinning ceremonies, Angelina College knows that nursing is more than a state-licensed occupation; it is a vocation grounded in faith; it is a vocation that says “Here I am.”   

Advent is the perfect time for men and women to respond to the call to nursing through The Nightingale Pledge, for just as our Blessed Mother said her own “Here I am” to God, so do nurses. 

There is perhaps no higher calling, for in emergency rooms, home health, ICU, clinics, hospital wards, missions, operating rooms, ambulances, medevacs, aboard ships at sea, and in the desert aid posts, nurses, to those suffering from disaster, disease, and the murderous follies of mankind, are the constant “Here I am.”

On this happy night there were photographs and cakes and congratulations, but after that there will be long shifts and sleepless nights and impossible demands upon their nursing skills and their energy.  There will sometimes be victories and happy endings, but there will also be many losses and sorrows.  To this sacred calling, Brittany, Amber, Samantha, and Tara have said, without hesitation, “Here I am.”

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A Light Shines in Jasper

Mack Hall

A Light Shines in Jasper

Last week, nine new Jasper nursing graduates were capped and pinned before their families, friends, instructors, and God in a traditional ceremony that has graced this community each year for some four decades.

Over forty years ago a number of Jasper visionaries considered the needs and possibilities of health care in East Texas, and persuaded the people to vote the creation of a hospital district.

Among the first fruits of this dream were Jasper Memorial Hospital and, shortly after, JMH’s state-sanctioned LVN school taught by my aunt, Rhoda Holmes, RN and definitely old-school. 

Many people agree that the only thing Rhoda, of happy memory, got wrong was the design of the school’s first nursing cap, which looked like a misshaped cold-drink cup with some blue fringe. 

More recently, other far-seeing Jasper folks helped facilitate a satellite campus of Angelina College, to which the Jasper LVN program has since been transferred.  The hospital practicum is as intense as ever, but vocational nursing students now join students from other disciplines in college English, math, and science courses.   The success is demonstrable – Jasper LVN candidates are among Texas’ best in the state board exams.

Upon graduate, Jasper LVN candidates join for one last lesson, and that lesson is in faith and ethics in a traditional pinning and capping ceremony which originated with Florence Nightingale over 150 years ago.

For this dignified ceremony Jasper nursing graduates wear traditional white uniforms and traditional white caps.

And at this point your humble scrivener digresses: what is with the moldy-looking scrubsuits that now infect hospitals?  When, once upon a time, a suffering patient saw the white uniform of an RN or LVN approaching, he knew for a certainty that the (metaphorical) cavalry had arrived, and that all was going to be better.  Nowadays the patient cannot tell whether the slovenly-dressed individual walking the ward is one of the health care professionals -- the nice lady who tidies up, a surgeon, an imaging technician, the charge nurse -- or some Occupy thug who wandered in to relieve himself on the floor.

End of grouchy aside.

Dais dignitaries for the occasion were: Nadia Martindale, MSN, RN, ACNS-BC; Melvin Johnson, MA-English, MA-History; Whitney Craven-Larkin, LVN; Sharon Buffalo, MSN, RN; Charlet Blades, MSN, RN; Amber Murphy, BSN, RN; Elizabeth Powell, M.Ed, RN; Donald R. Samuel, M.D., M. Gilliland, M.D.; Lynn Pearson,M.D.; P. Bidwell, M.D.; Rodney Pearson, Jasper Chief of Police; and Honore Bailey, RN and some other letters after her name, Angelina College nursing instructor, role model, ministering angel, and, yes, of the old school.

This year’s graduates were: Pamela Smith Davis, Rokeshia Nicole Elam, Jana Wise-Horton, Chelsea Nichol Livingston, Candace Cheri Locke, Amanda Michelle Lundquist, Kari Michelle Martin, Denise Lynn O’Neal, and Christie Crawford Williams.

The founders of Jasper’s growing medical community are mostly gone now, but they left a wonderful legacy.  Jasper Memorial Hospital serves more people than ever, health care providers find the area a positive place for establishing their professional practices, Angelina College continues the excellence of the Jasper LVN program, and the Mary Dickerson will perhaps soon enjoy a renaissance in providing medical service.

The Lady with the Lamp (who is just as likely to be the Gentleman) now carries a high-tech pocket flashlight and a palm computer on her night rounds, and the white uniform has been sacrificed temporarily for (gag) scrubs, but the professionalism, the skill, and the care remain forever.

Those squeaky shoes a wakeful patient might hear walking the quiet hospital corridors at 0-dark-thirty – those aren’t really shoes, those are the wings of an angel.

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