I Have Stories

(Not just because her polyester white uniform caused extreme daily overheating )

I had been a Nurse’s Aide on the 2nd floor of a small suburban hospital for about 5months. I was 16 and half that summer and trained with a skilled older nurse’s aide full time for a few weeks.

I remember it was a hot summer, made even worse by wearing an aqua polyester pantsuit on a non air conditioned unit.

By the time high school started , I could work under the supervision of any nurse on the unit.

And they all had different personalities. Not going to lie, I was afraid of one of them. She had to be at least 60 and could be heard yelling at everyone…. all day, every day. She treated the patients very well… just did not tolerate her “underlings”. Her special target was a male lab tech. I seriously believe he began to antagonize her on purpose .. in an effort to save his soul by plotting a reason for her viciousness.

The compassionate Head Nurse never assigned young aides to her. She knew.

The weekend nurses rotated and thankfully she was only around every other week.

The aides adored the nurses who were patient and taught us things….. after all we were headed to nursing school in a year and they were motivated to give us ideas of what we would learn.

I still remember their names and faces and their kindness towards the patients and the good care that they provided.

Unfortunately, ‘Connie’, was not one of the nice ones. She wasn’t mean .. she just never bothered to talk to the aides and may have been a little insecure.

One Saturday, I found out why.

The day started like any other. I was assigned to another nurse and proceeded to make beds, provided assistance with bed baths and turning patients.

The nurses gave meds and did wound care, monitored IVs, etc. The morning went by and soon it was lunch time.

Half of the nurses and aides went off the floor for lunch a half/hour at a time.

That left the floor short of help and was pretty miserable.

This included the 2 single bed rooms across from the Nurse’s Station. These rooms had cardiac monitors outside the doorways.

They were brown boxes on top of stainless steel carts with wires leading into the room ( taped to the floor) and extending to a huge connector on the patient’s bed with paper leads on their chests.

The monitor itself had a round area about the size of a peanut butter jar bottom that displayed the patient’s heart rhythm. It was archaic and often the alarms went off because the patient sweated the paper leads off.

Nurse’s aides were not allowed to take care of the cardiac patients and that was fine by me. They were always in pain and were (understandably) afraid for their lives. There was not a lot of interventions to offer in the late 70’s.

On this Saturday, I was putting lunch trays back in the metal cart and heard ‘Connie’ yelling for help. No one else was around – so I went into one of the monitored rooms and saw ‘Connie’ doing chest compressions. She yelled to me “Do mouth to mouth!” I had not been trained in CPR and told her I did not know how… So she showed me how to do chest compressions and I had never been so scared in my life.

As I was doing compressions- ‘Connie’ gave the woman ( she looked like her early 50’s) a couple of breaths and ran out to the nurses station. She got on the hospital PA system and called ”Stat Page” .

I continued compressions and I really did not know if it was doing any good. ‘ Connie’ ran back in and used an Ambu bag ( a football shaped device connected to oxygen that had a face mask). It provided the patient with O2 by squeezing the bag.(Rather than mouth to mouth).

We were soon surrounded by nurses, doctors and respiratory therapists, who took over. During all this commotion, the patient woke up. Very casually, the Head Nurse walked over to ‘Connie’ and said ” The Ambu works better when you connect the Oxygen”. (Evidently, ‘Connie’ had forgotten that step). She had also neglected to re-attach the patient’s leads and no one knew for sure when she lost or regained her heart rhythm.

I was very happy that the woman was alive…and slipped out of the room as doctors and nurses took over.

No one said a thing to me. I went to lunch with another aide and explained what happened. She was as horrified as I was at the prospect of doing CPR.

I did not wonder why we hadn’t been trained.. and never were until nursing school.

Clearly, we were below the stature of nurses.

I was not even sure what really happened. The Head Nurse (who had been at lunch) told me that the patient had a low pulse rate and passed out.

So much for state of the art care. But I did not know any different. And didn’t until I learned CPR in a class.

‘Connie’ had not shown me the correct way to do the chest compressions. Which explains why the patient was not further harmed by interference with her existing slow heart rhythm.

Shortly after the episode, ‘Connie’ was transferred to another floor that did not have cardiac patients.

I certainly did not miss her.