Share your story: nurses who go above and beyond.

Nurses who go above and beyond.

Oh yes. We have all seen it…nurses who push professional expectations, dedication or commitment to a whole other level during the course of their work.

Here is a for example.
We had a nurse working in our emergency department a while back, oh lets just call him….Matt.

Matt is a born adventurer, an avid climber and mountaineer.
Anyways, Matt turned up one afternoon after having a particularly nasty fall whilst climbing.
He didn’t look too crash hot when he staggered in, and sure enough it transpired that he had sustained a significant haemo-pneumothorax.
I helped the team to set up for his chest drain, tried to give him some words of support and then got called away to do something else.

I wandered back in a little bit later to see how things were going to find Matt conducting an educational in-service on chest tube insertion to a huddled group of new nurses.
Whilst he was having the chest tube inserted.

There he was cool as a cucumber, laying back with his left arm arched over his head as the doctor blunt dissected her way in between his ribs.
“Can you guys all see?”
“OK the doc is now using forceps to blunt dissect her way through my intercostal space”, he grunted.
“She will probably stick her finger right in there now to have a good feel around.” Which indeed she did.

Now, I once tried to be a bit cool like this by letting a group of students use me to place a naso-gastric tube.
Impressive no?
Well….for the record, this all ended very badly with a combo of ectoplasmic snot and gelatinous gobs of most un-educational particulate matter spraying from more than one of my orifices like some out-take from the movie Ghostbusters.

An NG tube is one thing….but a chest tube? I thought he was crazy. But I was impressed.

Once the tube was inserted and secured, he sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and proceeded to educate the wide eyed students on how to manage the under water sealed drain that he was now attached to.

That is Matt.

So how about you. Do you have a story of a nurse or colleague who has gone above and beyond during the course of their work? It doesn’t necessarily have to be quite as invasive as Matt’s story.
Simply…..nurses who have given more than would be expected of them.
We are all ears.