I was once on the other side of the call light. Now I’m the one answering it.
I remember standing over an ICU patient at his bedside, the tape already disconnected from his NG tube, telling him how uncomfortable it was going to be to have it removed.
“This is going to be fast, but it’s a weird feeling,” I said to him. “It’ll feel like someone is pulling your insides out.”
The patient nodded at me, his gaze steady, ready for what was coming next. “But,” I told him with a smile, “compared to what you’ve already been through, this will be easy.”
He closed his eyes, and within a few seconds, the tube was in my hands, and he breathed a sigh of relief, one step closer to getting out of the hospital. Even though I had removed many NG tubes at this point in my career, I wasn’t just sympathizing when I told him — I knew how it felt. As I pulled out that tube, I remembered just how weird it feels to have someone turn you inside out.
I knew how it felt because I had been there before.
Lessons from the front lines of the ICU
For the first eight years of my career, I worked as an RN in the trauma/surgery ICU of a major Level One trauma center, taking care of a large variety of patients, ranging from MVCs and ruptured aneurysms to blood-spurting esophageal varices.
I witnessed physicians drill into patients’ brains, sprinted down the hallway to STAT CT scans, picked lice out of patients’ hair, and saw too many lives lost.
As you can imagine, I stacked up a lot of experience, both clinically and emotionally, helping patients and families navigate the waters of tragedy, all of us trying to find our way to the other side. I cried a handful of times. But most days, I went in with a confidence that can only be earned by your own sweat, blood, tears, and late-night study sessions.
But my story in medicine didn’t start the day that I set foot into my unit as a new nurse graduate. It began years before.
The experience that shaped my path
When I was 14 years old, I was injured in an accident and was care-flighted to a major trauma hospital. With a massive liver laceration, a punctured lung, and several broken ribs, I was monitored in the ICU for a week or two and ended up missing about a month of school.
Although I don’t remember much of my time in the ICU, I do remember certain feelings, including uncertainty and pain. I remember feeling foggy from the medicines I was taking and being desperate for a drink of water despite my NPO regimen.
I remember thinking how scared my parents looked as they watched me lie under a thin white sheet, my anemic skin the same pale shade.
But my strongest memories are of the nurses who cared for me — the ones who were at my bedside, explaining my situation to my parents, giving me my scheduled medications, and even hanging posters on my walls that my friends had made for me. Although I will be forever grateful to the providers who undoubtably saved my life, I felt a closeness and gratitude to the nurses who had been at my side day in and day out.
After I recovered, I went back to see those nurses, thank them, and show them that their care and attention made a true difference. I got to return to my life as a teenage girl. I survived because other people did their jobs and did them well.
It was almost immediately that I realized that I wanted to dedicate my life to this same hands-on profession. I went to a university with a great nursing program and graduated with my BSN only a handful of years after my accident.
Full circle: From patient to nurse
In a twist of fate, I ended up taking a job in the same trauma ICU that I had previously been a patient in, where I was able to tell my patients that I was very familiar with how they felt lying in those beds.
For the next eight years, I grew as a nurse, taking on various roles and using all my experience and expertise to help my patients and their families. Eventually, I left the ICU and went back to school to become a nurse practitioner.
I now work in primary care and use many of those same skills in a less acute setting, still listening, watching, and caring on a daily basis. Though I would never wish a life-threatening trauma on anyone, I can appreciate this point in my story because it pushed me in a new direction — one that led to a very fulfilling career in medicine.
I’m proud to be a nurse for many reasons, but one of the biggest is that I get to be present for those crucial moments in people’s lives — the ones that can change a person’s entire trajectory.
Now it’s my turn to stand on the other side and make a difference, to be the person who is present, knowledgeable, and supportive. It’s my honor to do my job and do it well.
My past overlapped with my present in a poignant way, and I hope I can continue to pay it forward for many years to come.