The Heart of Nursing

By Lori J. Brooks

Lori Brooks spent over twenty years in nursing practice as both a registered nurse and nurse practitioner. In this book, she takes you through the care of some of her more memorable patients throughout the years from a first-person perspective and shares the emotional and physical toll that patient care takes on care providers. From confused patients running down the halls with their chest tubes bouncing on the ground to the complex care of a dying patient, she provides insight into the world of nursing that few are privileged to view. Some of these stories are funny and will make you laugh out loud, others are heart-wrenchingly sad, and you are invited to follow along as the author navigates through their care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798893091717

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Plot

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Chapter 2: It Was All About Christmas

Chapter 3: It's a Little Confusing

Chapter 4: It's a Matter of Authority

Chapter 5: Halloween

Chapter 6: A Little Bit of Mayhem

Chapter 7: What a Shock

Chapter 8: It's Out of My Control

Chapter 9: It's a Little Bit Stressful

Chapter 10: A Little Bit of Mercy

Chapter 11: Laughter Is Good Medicine

Chapter 12: A New Lease on Life

Chapter 13: Hey, I Can Do That

About the Author

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The Heart of Nursing

Lori J. Brooks

ISBN 979-8-89309-170-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-89309-171-7 (Digital)

Copyright © 2024 Lori J. Brooks

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Follow me through my career as a nurse.

This is a work of fiction, although it is based upon actual experiences in my nursing career. I have twenty-three years of experience as a registered nurse in one form or another, with seven years of that time taking care of patients in the hospital setting. Throughout the years, various patients have remained in my memory for one reason or another, most often for a memorable stay while in the hospital, and those are the stories that I have attempted to capture here. I have told many of these stories to my family and friends and finally decided to put pen to paper to record them once and for all.

This book is unique among adventure stories in that it tells the tale of a registered nurse from the first-person perspective throughout the book, looking at different aspects of being a nurse and providing nursing care. It starts with my first contemplation of a nursing career and follows through my choice to train as a nurse practitioner.

Plot

My career as a nurse has been both colorful and educational. I have learned more in my twenty-three-year career than I could have ever imagined when starting out, both educationally and spiritually. Sometimes humorous and often heart-wrenchingly sad, I wouldn't change the experience for anything. This book is an attempt to put down some of the experiences that still rotate through my mind and have shaped the way I relate to life and the world in general.

The story begins with my untimely brand of luck, which has plagued me since I was a very small girl growing up in Spokane, Washington, and ultimately led me to a career as a registered nurse despite the odds against it. After detailing some of the odd things that happened to me as a child, it is told from the beginning, when and how I chose nursing as a career after leaving an abusive spouse with two small children to raise on my own. It continues through the trials of raising those small children while attending nursing school, not for the faint of heart by any means, culminating in graduation and beginning my practice for which I was woefully unprepared at the time.

The remainder of the story chronicles many of the patients that I have cared for over the years who have made an impression on me and whom I will never forget. Some of the stories are funny and will make you laugh out loud while others are heart-wrenchingly sad and pull at your heartstrings, but all are based upon real experiences and patients. The story ends with my choice to broaden my scope of practice into that of a nurse practitioner, taking on the role of writing the plan of care rather than following it, all the while from a nurse's point of view. I have attempted to take you on a journey through the eyes of a nurse. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

For some reason that I don't always understand, things happen to me. For as long as I can remember, it has always been that way. It's usually not very funny at the time but occasionally humorous later on. Take, for example, the time my parents left me in a gas station restroom. Yes, this really happened; I was six years old at the time. At the time, our family was traveling three thousand miles from Washington State to Tennessee to visit my grandparents, and I was beyond excited about the trip. It was the end of the school year, but we were not quite out of school for the summer, so it was also a chance to play hooky, although my teacher had sent schoolwork to be done while we were on the road.

My mother grew up in East Tennessee with five younger brothers to watch out for. She was several years older than them, and they loved and adored her to pieces. After graduating from high school, she took a secretarial job in Washington, DC, with the War Department during the Korean War. It was the first time that she had ever been away from home, and I would guess that she was more than a little homesick and lonely, being eighteen and living on her own for the first time in the big city.

There she met my dad, who was an enlisted soldier in the Marine Corps. He was tall and handsome with dark hair and engaging brown eyes, and they fell in love, or at least they thought that they did. After marriage, she moved to Washington State to live with his mother, my paternal grandmother, who lived in a large house that was already old in the 1950s. At the time, she had planned to stay in Washington State with my grandmother until my dad was discharged from the service a few years later. However, fate intervened, as it so often does in life, and she ended up back with her mother and father in East Tennessee less than a year later.

My sister was born while my dad was away at war and was born allergic to cow's milk. No matter how much she was fed, my sister withered away until my mom worried that she might die and took her back to East Tennessee and her mother, my maternal grandmother. My grandmother nursed her back to health on goat's milk after trying every other alternative available at the time. From what I recall of the stories my mom told, it was a very smelly but nutritious substitute for cow's milk, and my sister began gaining weight, becoming a healthy, sassy toddler.

Being the first grandchild, she was also very pampered and spoiled, with several uncles still living at home to dote on her and a grandmother who adored her but nicknamed her the general for her bossy ways. I can attest to that bossiness myself; we shared a bedroom, and she thought that I was a nuisance growing up, always following her and her friends around and getting in the way. After all, she was three years older and therefore much more mature, and I was in the way, but I adored her and still do to this day.

After my dad was discharged from the Marine Corps, my mother moved back to Washington State to be with him, and our little family started on its course in history. My brother and I came along one right after the other soon after and, with a bird dog or two thrown into the mix for variety, completed the family group. Neither my brother nor I had ever met our grandparents in Tennessee, and we were very excited about the sheer adventure of traveling across the country in a camper to meet them.

My dad had always had a love of hunting, fishing, and camping, and we often went along, with my poor mother trying to keep up amid the chaos of living on the road with three children. He had built a camper top for his truck in the backyard that we traveled in before he could afford to trade it in for a nicer one. So after much anticipation and planning over several months, two adults, three children, and a whole lot of beer were packed into a camper that was perched upon the back of my dad's Ford truck, and off we went.

The family dog, a lab named Domino for a few specks of white among his otherwise glossy black coat, was boarded out to a kennel while we were gone. A natural-born escape artist, I can remember several phone calls while we were visiting Tennessee about Domino having jumped the fence and escaped. Thankfully, a handful of treats brought him back into captivity until we returned, decanting from the camper like a bunch of travel-weary troops to his tail-wagging welcome.

While traveling on the road, my dad tried to save money wherever he could and rarely thought to pay for something as handy as a camping spot at the end of the day. After all, we had everything that we could possibly need perched on the back of that old truck, except for showers or bathrooms, that is. That would have been way too easy and convenient. More often than not, he would find a nearby field or a highway underpass to camp in for the night. Both options allowed for privacy, and my dad kept a gun in the cab of the truck for security. I didn't mind a bit; it was all a big adventure for us kids, but not so much for my mom, who oversaw taking care of all of us.

Amenities such as hot showers and bathrooms would have been nice, but I didn't care. What kid volunteers to take a bath anyway? Not a normal one, if you ask me, particularly while living in a camper. I was too busy having fun to worry about being clean, and my siblings felt the same way. To this day, I find the noise of traffic under a highway underpass soothing, as I so often fell asleep to the rhythm of cars and semitrucks speeding past above my head.

On this particular occasion, after camping overnight in a farmer's field, we headed for the nearest gas station to use the restrooms and change our clothes. I can remember waking up and looking out of the camper's window to find that we were in the middle of a wheat field, the golden grain waving softly in the breeze. That is definitely not something you see every day. After changing out of pajamas, my mom had herded everyone back into the camper to get back out on the road again. Everyone but me, that is. I had quietly waited in line, and it was my turn to use the restroom to change for the day.

I was still in my pink footie pajamas at the time; my mom had not yet handed me my clothes over the top of the stall to change into. So there I was, waiting patiently for clothing to appear at the top of the stall door, wondering what was taking so long for my mom to hand them to me. After a few minutes, I can remember finally realizing that I was alone in the bathroom and emerging from the stall to total confusion on my part. Surely, they had not left me behind to fend for myself; everyone else must have been in the gas station store waiting for me to come out so that we could leave and get back on the road.

Unfortunately, no one was waiting for me in the store. Neither parent had noticed that their middle child didn't make it back into the camper until they had made it about twenty miles down the road. The three of us kids used to take turns riding in the cab of my dad's truck with our parents for a while to catch up on some schoolwork, filling in ditto sheets one after another while my mom watched and helped with the harder parts. Once installed between them in the cab, we would work on mimeograph sheets of schoolwork sent by our teachers to keep up our academic progress while we were on the road. No one had gotten into the cab with our parents at the gas station, and after a while, my sister realized that I was missing and banged on the camper top until my dad pulled over to see what was going on. Thank goodness for my sister.

So there I was, bawling my eyes out with the poor gas station attendant trying to comfort me. Talk about having a bad day at work; imagine that you are just going along about your day, doing your job, and a kid in her pajamas wanders into the store at the gas station where you work. I can only imagine the story that he told when he got home to his own family. He did his best to comfort me, even gave me a candy bar, but to no avail; I was frightened and refused to be comforted.

I was painfully shy as a child and didn't do well with strangers, and this was just too much. Turning the truck around once they had realized what had happened, my parents sped back to the gas station in what I can only imagine was sheer panic mode. After all, how do you manage to lose a kid in a gas station? I can tell you one thing; it sure was a relief to see that old truck with its camper top coming back down the road to get me. I was even glad to see my brother and sister again.

My brother and I were often at odds lying up there in the cab-over of the camper, he on one side and me on the other. We are only fifteen months apart and fought with each other constantly growing up. He was always getting in trouble for breaking my toys, and me for playing with his because he had broken all of mine. My brother was the kind of kid who liked to take everything apart to see how it worked. He would spend hours taking something apart down to the screws that held everything together. Unfortunately, he didn't always know how to put it back together again, leaving me with broken stuff. My sister always rode in the middle between us because, being three years older, she was taller and needed room for her long legs, so she got to play referee a lot.

My parents let me ride up in the cab of the truck for a while after picking me up; I think they felt pretty guilty, which they should have. I didn't even have to do the normal homework that came with the privilege. Nowadays, they would be scandalized in the court of public opinion. I can see the headlines now: Parents Abandon Child at Random Gas Station. I may have even been famous for a few days and on the news, sans pajamas of course.

Then there was the time in first grade when my teacher told my parents that I was a little slow. I was very shy and did not communicate well with the other children or the teacher, nor was I keeping up academically with the other students. What followed was a plethora of testing that included academic, psychological, and physical exams. At long last, my eyes were examined, and lo and behold, it was discovered that I was nearsighted—very nearsighted.

Not only could I not see the teacher, but the other students and the blackboard were a total blur as well. No wonder I was so shy and never talked to anyone; I couldn't see their faces well enough to know who was talking to me, let alone what they were talking about. I was living in a fuzzy and lonely world. As luck would have it, I also kept getting in trouble for being clumsy and would often have to sit out in the hallway as punishment for bumping into one thing or another and causing disruption in the classroom. The teacher used to get aggravated with me because I inevitably fell asleep out there in the hallway all by myself with no one to talk to. Take that, Mrs. Brown; put me out in the hallway to punish me, and I'll just take a nap. She must have been so exasperated with me.

One pair of brown 1960s cat-eye-shaped eyeglasses later and the whole world came into beautiful focus. I remember being astonished that the trees had individual leaves; I could actually make out individual faces, and I could see the writing on the blackboard that everyone had been talking about! A whole new world opened up in ways that I could never have imagined, although I remain clumsy to this day. My nickname as a child was Grace, and it fit me well; I was always stumbling over one thing or another.

What followed next were the remedial classes, including special reading and math classes that caught me up with the other students academically. As if being chubby and wearing glasses were not enough to make me awkward, that really topped things off. I did gain one valuable skill from all those remedial classes, though. I discovered the love of reading. I found out that a good book can take you anywhere at any time, open worlds inaccessible from my little bedroom in Spokane, Washington. During the next few years of school, the school library became one of my favorite places to be. It was always full of kindred spirits, lost and lonely children with a love for reading like me, ready to get lost in a good story, like Charlotte's Webb or Pippi Longstocking.

It was also during this fuzzy pre-glasses period when I put my right hand into a large box window fan.