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• W2414101145 abstract "For the last 7 years, I have been working for a VA hospital in the Midwest. One night, I had the most interesting experience of my 23 years of professional nursing when I had the privilege to help care for 5 extraordinary patients. These 5 patients sent me back in time through the wars our nation have fought since 1942 to the present—all in one night.I work the midnight tour in a small intensive care unit—6 beds, only 2 RNs working that shift. It was one cold and snowy night in December 2004. It was going to be one of those nights, I could just tell. As soon as I walked into the main lobby of the hospital, one of the police offers on duty that night told me to “head for the hills.” I just smiled and said thanks for the heads up. When I arrived in the unit, the pm crew was on the verge of running out the door. They had 4 patients, the fourth admit only a few minutes before I arrived. My cohort in crime that night was right behind me. We listened to the reports and hit the floor running.My first patient was Joe, an 84-year-old man admitted for chest pain. As I was going through my assessment, he asked me why I talked so “funny.” I smiled and said, “I’m from the south, Louisiana, to be exact.” Joe laughed and said, “I thought you were from Louisiana.”He proceeded to tell me how he knew, “I was stationed at Fort Polk, that’s in Alexandria, Louisiana, you know.” he said. “I was 20 years old and did my basic there before I was shipped overseas. It was 1942, and my company was stationed in Germany. I was wounded, shot twice in the left leg, broke the bones, during Normandy invasion, Omaha Beach, D-Day. You have heard of D-Day?” I told him I knew some of the history of D-Day. “Well, let me tell you,” Joe said, “it was not a pretty picture. We were getting shelled and shot at from the moment we hit the water. Our craft was hit and we had to bail out. A lot of my buddies drowned that day. We were like sitting ducks in a pond. Bullets were flying over my head and next to me. I never was so scared in all my born days.”I was glued to the spot I was standing on. “Well, my best friend was killed right next to me.” Joe continued, “I finally hit the beach and belly-crawled, trying to find cover. What was left of my platoon was huddled together trying to stay out of the line of fire. All this time the shelling never stopped. It was deafening. Well, it seemed like days, but we were finally able to get to a hillside. The Germans were picking us off like flies. It was total chaos. It was like living through a nightmare.” He stopped talking after that. I asked him if he was wounded at that time. He told me no, he was wounded 3 days after. “My platoon was on maneuvers that day. Well, I guess I should have gone left instead of right.” he laughed, “I was hit and went down like a lead ball. The next thing I remembered, I was in the back of a truck with a few other guys. My leg was bandaged and I was in a lot of pain. I was eventually shipped to a hospital in England. You know I was one of the lucky GIs that went home in style. I was shipped home on the Queen Mary herself.” When Joe finished, I told him I really enjoyed listening to his story and thanked him for sharing it with me.My next patient was across the hall. George was quite a character—75 years old and tanned from playing golf in Arizona. Like Joe, he was a talker. George was admitted with gastrointestinal bleeding and was getting blood because his hemoglobin level was below 6 g/dL. As I was hanging up the second unit, George told me he was a medic in the Korean War. “The blood I would hang didn’t come in a plastic bag, it was in a glass bottle.” he said. “I also worked in a MASH unit. I loved that show with Alan Alda. It was pretty close to the real deal when they were being serious on the show. It was not glamorous all the time, especially when the choppers came in. When you heard the choppers, you knew there was some heavy fighting going on. We would move the unit on occasions, depending on where the fighting was. When some of us would get a 48-hour pass, we would head to Seoul. Now that was a partying town. There must have been a hundred bars if there was one. Of course we tried to visit every one of them if we could.“It was sad to see families peddling their daughters, right next to the bars, trying to get enough money to buy food so they could eat. You walk down the streets and see young girls, kids, barely 10 years old, working as prostitutes.” As George talked his expression changed, a sad, almost a tearful look. I told George I would return in a few minutes to check on him and the unit of blood. As I turned to go, I thanked him for the story. He smiled back and said, “Anytime.”I had just sat down when the emergency department called to say they were bringing up a patient with a diagnosis of second-degree heart block. Ron, a 56-year-old man, was nervous, and I assured him that I would be explaining everything that would be happening to him. He said that he had not been admitted to a hospital in years. “The last time I was in a hospital was in 1969, in Vietnam.” he said. I asked him if he had been wounded in Vietnam. “Yep, I sure was,” he pronounced, “Right here, in my right shoulder. Shot while going in a tunnel to check it out.” I asked him what kind of tunnel it was. “Remember that movie, Forrest Gump?” he asked. “He was a tunnel rat also in that movie. The enemy had tunnels dug into the ground all over. Some of those tunnels were like catacombs and could hold 100 or more people. There were radios, ammunition, guns, maps, food, and whatever else they needed. When we would find a tunnel, we had to secure it by checking it out. Some of us would volunteer to do it while other times you were ordered to. Majority of the times the enemy was in there and all hell would break out. Other times there was no one home. Well, it was one of those times when someone was home that I got shot. Matter of fact, a few of us was shot that day and a few of us died, too. You know, I went to see the Vietnam monument and found my buddy’s name. He died the day I got shot.”When Ron was settled in for the night, I checked on my other 2 patients and then on my colleague Jan, who was in the last room on the unit, talking to one of her patients. Steve, a 40-year-old man, had an emergency appendectomy a couple of days earlier, but was feeling much better. He talked to Jan and me about the news on CNN. “I can’t believe we’re still in Iraq,” he said. “When I was in the Gulf War in 1991, it was a lot different. We didn’t go through this. The war only lasted for a couple of months, and it was done. People were turning themselves over to us so they could become prisoners of war. Back then, the people of Iraq had no food or supplies to keep up the fighting. We didn’t have anywhere near the number of causalities that the war has now. It was mostly an air war. It’s so upsetting to watch the news and know that almost every day one or more of our troops are killed or wounded.”About that time, one of the patients had put his call light on. When I answered it, I came across Matthew, the youngest male patient in the ward. At 19, he had been stationed in Iraq the year before and was in our unit for about a week to heal enough to go to rehab. His left lower leg had been shattered by a hidden homemade land mine a couple of months earlier in Iraq. “It was my turn to check the surrounding area around the compound,” he said. “It was during one of what seemed like daily sand storms. We were out there and you guessed it, I couldn’t see and stepped on it. Thank God my buddies were not injured, and it was only a homemade bomb and not a big one. Well, everyone was on total alert at that point—not like we already weren’t. I was stabilized at the compound and shipped to the hospital. I thought I was going to die. All I could think about was my mom and how upset she would be if I died. I was more worried about my mom than myself. You know, it’s a crazy war,” he went on. “You’re there to fight, and at the same time, you’re supposed to help these people out. One day the people are happy to see you and the next; we’re shooting at each other.”My tour having ended with everyone doing fine, I reported off, changed out of my uniform and headed out the door. As I drove home, I recapped the tour to myself. A strange feeling came over me—like a warm sensation of emotions. I was thinking about what each of the patients told me, how they were injured, why, when, and where. Each one of these veterans gave me a piece of their lives. It was as if I had traveled back in time. I had traveled sixty 60 years and 5 wars in 8 hours. This was a very sobering and humbling thought. At that moment, I had never in my life felt prouder to be an American and a nurse, to be privileged enough to care for these 5 individuals all in 1 night. I smiled to myself the rest of the way home.“In Our Unit” highlights unique practices, innovations, research, or resourceful solutions to commonly encountered problems in critical care areas and settings where critically ill patients are cared for. If you have an idea for an upcoming “In Our Unit,” send it to Critical Care Nurse, 101 Columbia, Aliso Viejo, CA 92656; fax, (949) 362-2049; e-mail, ccn@aacn.org." @default.
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• W2414101145 date "2005-12-01" @default.
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• W2414101145 title "Going Through the Wars: A Passage in Time" @default.
• W2414101145 doi "https://doi.org/10.4037/ccn2005.25.6.72" @default.
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