Healthy You

The nursing profession is a fantastic career. It requires a high standard of education, complex decision making skills, overwhelming responsibilities, the ability to provide care, motivate and nurture those in need, and function in traumatic circumstances. The Occupational Information Network of the US Department of Labor listed five areas of nursing in the top thirty most stressful jobs. Of the 873 jobs on the list, acute care nursing, ranked number six. Nurse anesthetists ranked number ten, midwives ranked eleven, psychiatric nurses ranked sixteen, and critical care nurses ranked twenty-six. I began my career in acute care nursing. For the last eight years, part of my role has been mentoring the Three Principles of Mind, Thought, and Consciousness to help people understand where their stress is coming from. The principles help people become aware of the following:

1. The power of wisdom and insight is at the core of our being. We access it when not caught up in the whirlwind of personal thought.
2. The gift of thought that serves us throughout our lives. We are conscious of the world and everything around us as interpreted through thought.
3. Every thought we have has a feeling attached to it. Our thoughts, not circumstances, create our feelings one hundred percent of the time.
4. Things get accomplished if we show up and respond to what shows up

I realized how much this paradigm is an instinctual part of our nature recently when I had the opportunity to reminisce with some of the healthcare family who guided me as I started my journey so long ago. The
events during my first year stood out the most. Everyone had a different slant on the details. Still, all remembered the event, the excitement, and the fact that we banded together to solve difficult situations.
I started as an assistant evening supervisor in our rural acute care hospital. There was a Registered Nurse (RN) shortage in the 1970s, and often, there were only two or three RNs for the hospital. The Licensed Vocational Nurses (LVN) were highly skilled in procedures, and they and the Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA) provided direct patient care. Often, there were no emergency room physicians at night. When the
ambulance picked up the patient, they would call the switchboard, and the RN would notify the on-call physician. The nurse would care for the patient until the doctor arrived. Compared to the standards we operate under now, RNs of the 1970s functioned in the wild, wild west of nursing.

New nurses are not prepared to add unusual disaster circumstances to their repertoire of skills. During my first year of nursing, I experienced two traumatic disaster events. The first was during my first day as an RN at our hospital. About an hour before I was to report for duty, the emergency sirens alerted us to a storm. For the last eight years, part of my role has been mentoring the Three Principles of Mind, Thought, and Consciousness to help people understand where their stress is coming from. High winds, rain, and hail pounded the area for about 20 minutes. The parking lot looked like a war zone when I drove into work. The grapefruit-sized hail pulverized the cars and shattered their windshields in the parking lot. When I looked up, I saw shards of glass on the hospital’s west side, where the windows had once been. I rushed inside. We had a brief update and started working to organize the patients placed in the hall for safety. Maintenance and the hospital administrator quickly boarded up the west windows. Respiratory therapy set up portable oxygen tanks and heart monitors for the displaced patients. Makeshift rooms were set up in the hall using accordion screens for privacy and silver bells to ring should they need a nurse. The rooms on the other sides of the hospital were okay but were all occupied. The storm caused trees to blow down throughout the area, and some staff members could not get to the hospital for their shifts. We improvised quite a bit that evening. The day staff stayed late to help us, and the night shift came in early. The administrator stayed and served as an orderly until we settled down. He said that he started his career as an orderly and still remembered how. The patients were cooperative, and thanks to the support of the healthcare family, we got through the night.

I rocked along as an RN in the hospital for several months, learning my role as charge nurse and assistant evening supervisor. One evening during my shift, the CNA ran down the hall. “Fire! Fire!” she said and pulled the fire alarm. The house supervisor called a code blue to get people to the area. The hall was full of smoke. What I thought would be a trash can fire was a bed fire progressing throughout the room. There was a fire hose on the wall that two of our orderlies hooked up, but it didn’t work. A doctor brought a fire extinguisher to the room. The heat from the room burned our lungs as we went in. The ER nurse dove under the bed to unplug it, and the physician extinguished the flames on the bed. We rolled the patient and the bed out of the room. Something was wrong with the fire alarm because it did not alert the fire department. Our team had the fire extinguished by the time the firefighters arrived. The emergency room nurse and doctor took the patient to the emergency department for stabilization until the Care Flight helicopter transferred him to the Parkland Burn Unit. I encountered two stressful situations early in the first year of my career. Many young nurses would have left the profession for a less stressful one, such as starting an art shop (which was always my exit fantasy). Resilience is “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult and challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.” I think we accomplished that. Instinctually, the Principles guided us in each situation. We focused, and wisdom and insights came through. People and supplies showed up when they needed to. We showed up and responded to what was happening, which enabled us to remain calm and cope with these difficult situations. The crucial factor was we had a close-knit healthcare team that banded together and supported each other during the crises. The support of the hospital family is what ensured that we were resilient.