Grateful for Nurses

With all my talk of relationships and human experiences I also want to take some time to focus on gratefulness. I believe that being grateful in every avenue of your life has the potential to enhance the capacity of the situation giving it the ability to transform, especially when it is difficult or heart breaking.

Considering the broad spectrum of health care that I have been involved in over the last thirty years ranging from my parents to Michael’s to my husbands and my own I hope one of the things I display and verbalize is how grateful I am. I have such tremendous gratefulness for every nurse who has helped me and my family over the years. The nurse who could schedule three different appointments in multiple specialty cares on the same day so that Michael missed only one day of school. The nurses who could do a blood draw in just one poke calming Michael's fears. The nurse who took the time to chat with me at 6am before her shift began while I sat outside Michael’s hospital room. The nurse who brought us fruit and snacks because she noticed we weren’t eating properly while in ICU. Truly the list is endless as is my gratitude.

I am profoundly grateful for the extremely difficult job every nurse does day in and day out, weekends, holidays, overnights and double shifts. Emergencies and illness does not limit itself to Monday through Friday, nine to five. They care for us in our most vulnerable state with medical expertise and gifted ability seeing us through events that are quite possibly the happiest and saddest moments of our lives. How can you properly thank someone for that? Although in my opinion there isn’t much that replaces a simple sincerely spoken thank you, I find even the best of Hallmark cards fall short in expressing my deep and heart felt thanks to nurses.

One of my hopes and prayers in my efforts through Be the Change is of course that relationships between patients, families and providers will be strengthened and the human experience reclaimed but also that it speaks of my gratefulness to all nurses.

Thank you, thank you, with all my heart, thank you nurses.