Dripping Life May 2

Every year, May 6th through 12th, the United States has celebrated National Nurses Week, culminating on the 12th by observing Florence Nightingale’s birthday. The American Nurses Association began celebrating a day to recognize nurses in Nightingale in 1953.  In 1993, the observance expanded to a week.

Nightingale, born in 1820, is credited as the founder of modern nursing and came from a wealthy, well-connected family who were members of the British aristocracy.

Young Florence would have none of her privilege and, instead, she chose to become a social reformer, a statistician (because she was quite good in mathematics) and tackled the problems of taking care of the wounded in wartime and in controlling the epidemic spread of diseases.

In 2000, my bosses at The Houston Chronicle made the decision to have an annual Salute to Nurses. Asking for nominations from the community (now more than 3000) a blue-ribbon panel selected 100 (now 150) of the top nurses to recognize and from that number, chose 10 (now 15) to feature in the newspaper and in digital media. I was asked to interview the Top 10 in 2000 and have continued with that honor for 20 years.

In those two decades, I’ve met nurses who took care of elderly grandparents and, from that experience, went to nursing school. I’ve also met men and women who, in their mid-career, decided they wanted to give more back, leaving six-figure jobs to go into nursing. There were two nurses in their late 70s one year who said they couldn’t retire because of the shortage of clinicians to teach nursing students, and after Hurricane Katrina, I met a nurse who opened her home to a patient who was admitted to the hospital upon her arrival in Houston from New Orleans and had no place to go, once she was discharged.

I’ve met a school nurses who made it possible for her high school students to receive health care for the first times in their lives and another nurse who brought volunteer dentists to her school to conduct dental checks. Students who needed care were taken to the offices of volunteers for fillings and extractions, and for more serious cases, the nurse found professors at the dental school to perform those procedures.

I have known nurses who care for inmates in prisons, active-duty soldiers and veterans in VA hospitals and clinics, who see patients in churches and who provide care to the homeless on city streets and under bridges. 

There also was the graduate nurse I met when she joined the U.S. Army. Born to immigrant parents who fled Vietnam, I maintained contact with this amazing nurse as she climbed the ranks, was deployed to care for the wounded in a remote Afghanistan outpost before returning stateside.

Another year, a nurse watched with sadness as a co-worker began experiencing kidney failure. Then, she offered to donate a kidney, which was a perfect match, and gave her fellow nurse a new, functioning kidney…and then there was the nurse who, upon learning a recently-diagnosed terminal patient wanted to marry his partner of 40 years, made it possible for the couple to wed just days before the patient died. 

This year, too, I interviewed a nurse who made it possible for her supervisor, also recently diagnosed with terminal illness, to receive her doctorate degree in her hospital room. The nurse arranged for the university’s dean of nursing and several faculty members to make the presentation to the patient, now confined to bed but dressed in full doctoral regalia. This truly fulfilled her dying wish. 

In describing these nurses, I’ve not mentioned the nurses who saved lives, thanks to their skills of observation and knowledge of their specialty, nor have I told you about the Life Flight nurse who put himself in Harm’s Way to keep a patient stabilized until the ‘chopper set down on the hospital’s landing pad. 

In my eyes, every nurse is a hero -- at the bedside, the lab, the operating room, classroom or the rural clinic where there are not enough doctors to meet demand. The nurses in the courtroom, those working to update healthcare policy, those taking care of the elderly in Catholic convents, nursing homes or assisted living centers. The nurses who staff city, county and state prison hospitals, driving mobile clinics into local neighborhoods or serving colonias in the Rio Grande Valley or somewhere along the Texas-Mexican border, making healthcare available to people unable to access it. 

I have been blessed with the opportunity of getting to know each one of the 230 nurses honored during The Salute as well as the nurses who have taken care of my family, friends and me – all heroes, all called to serve.

Please join me any time -- but especially May 6th -12th  – in saying “thank-you” to the nurses…men and women who supply much of the energy in our healthcare system, every day of the year.