Kristin Sollars (KS): Don’t you feel like you’re a nurse everywhere you go? I mean, let’s be honest, every time we get on a plane… you’re like, ‘E6 didn’t look good to me. Keep an eye out there.’
Marci Ebberts (ME): Between us, we’ve taken care of thousands of critically ill patients.
KS: Yeah…when I think about that patient, that is the most seared in my brain, I know exactly what bed but I cannot tell you the patient’s name. I always think about CCU Bed 2 — that guy with his wife…[crosstalk]
ME: -Oh yeah-
KS: -Remember that? Cardiac arrest on the stairs to bed. And we code him and we get that heart rate back…
(Crosstalk.)
ME: And that was just the first of a dozen times that he coded.
KS: Yeah, We were giving her the bad prognosis things were looking really bad and she said, ‘can I be in bed with him?’ This man’s got everything we’ve got in the hospital attached to him.
ME: So many wires and tubes and monitors.
KS: From the head and the foot and the left and the right… And we go in and we lift all those things that are attached to him…and we wiggle her from the foot of the bed to lying next to him And I can just remember her sobbing, saying, ‘You know, I wasn’t a good enough wife, I should have loved you better.
ME: I remember when there he goes into V-fib again. And we had to start compressions again. And then she said ‘Stop — we’re gonna let him go next time he does that.’
KS: To be with people and to create those environments where they get to say their unfinished business to their husband — it’s such a gift of a job. Sometimes I wonder why everyone in the world doesn’t wanna be a nurse.
ME: All your patients, you carry a little bit of them with you… and they shape you…
KS: It does impact the way we see the entire world. That person in front of us in the grocery store is all worked up about how that guy bagged their groceries.
ME: I mean, ‘what do you mean you can’t take this coupon?…’
KS: Yeah and this isn’t worth getting so worked up about.
ME: Mhmm. Nobody’s dying.
KS: Yeah.
ME: Until someone is… And then we’re ready.
KS: And then we’re ready.
