Saboba Update August 26, 2013 “This is Nursing” It’s 4 AM and I have just returned from checking a young mother at the hospital. As I approached the female ward, I could hear our little old lady with cancer groaning in pain. Puzzled, I checked with the nurse, only to find that the pain medicine should have been given much earlier. I had to explain to the nurse on duty that this poor lady has a pelvis full of cancer; what she needs at this point is tender loving care and enough pain medicine to make her comfortable, in essence, hospice care. And as I was explaining, I was thinking of my mother. My mother, Helen Dale Mathis Bjorling, went through nurses training at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis during World War II. In those days as graduate nurses left for the military, competent student nurses were put in charge of 40 bed wards. This experience was formative for my mother, and as a child I heard lots of her stories about things that happened on those wards. Those were the days of bed baths, back rubs, and so many other kinds of bedside care that have been curtailed in recent years as nurses have been forced to spend 10 minutes documenting the 5 minutes they spend with a patient. Don’t get me wrong; there are lots of great nurses out there. And many of them are frustrated because they entered nursing to help people and they find themselves overwhelmed by paperwork, or computer work, as the case might be. But in Mom’s day there were far fewer advanced treatments for many ailments, so many times the best and only treatments consisted of dedicated nursing care. And sometimes that care all by itself yielded amazing results. My mother married an Illinois farmer and went out into the country to live in an area in which the only phone communications consisted of the original party lines that were put in when phones first came into use. Our phone was a genuine working antique. In those days right after World War II farm women could be quite isolated. Trips to town, even a town only three miles away, were an event because they required gasoline. Farm women did not just pick up and run all over the place. Cell phones, the internet, Twitter, and Facebook did not exist. There was no way women who were friends could maintain the kind of close communications now taken for granted; as a consequence of this I became my mother’s confidant at an early age. Mom told me most of her war stories, and I even learned to make beds at the age of 3 by turning hospital corners on the sheets and learning the most efficient method for changing pillow cases. When we were sick, Mom would arrange lovely trays for our meals, another by-product of her nurses training. Throughout all of this Mom was giving me a seminar in Advanced Caring; I just didn’t realize it. There are many times when I feel that the medicine I am practicing is similar to that encountered by my mother 60 years ago, and this is one of them. Our poor little old lady has ovarian cancer that has spread throughout her pelvis. I had to do a colostomy to alleviate a bowel obstruction. Then the cancer invaded the bladder. Rather than continually sticking IV cannulas in this lady, we have inserted a feeding tube into her nose and down into her stomach. This allows us to give medicines, feeds, etc., but is not all that pleasant. The patient is bed ridden and requires frequent turning, back rubs, talcum powder, colostomy care, etc. it’s not very easy and certainly not fun for anyone, least of all for the patient. In such circumstances it is tempting to mentally write off a patient; meanwhile, these patients are the ones who require the most skilled nursing. We have a problem in Ghana. Many of the nurses who should be around to give leadership and to mentor younger nurses left for greener pastures in the industrialized world years ago. This exodus has left us with a number of young immature nurses who have little idea as to what constitutes good bedside care. This morning my nurse on duty was treated to a quick lecture in which I explained the patient’s difficult medical condition and also explained that there was no point in referring her somewhere else. Saboba is close to this lady’s home community and one of her nieces works on the ward on which the patient has been admitted. I reminded this nurse that this lady was someone’s mother, someone’s auntie. I asked him how he would want his mother to be cared for. And I wound up my mini-lecture with the following statement: ”Anyone can hand a patient a few tablets or give a few injections. But it’s patients such as our little old lady who demand hard work and attention to minute details. Taking care of someone such as this is not easy, but if you really want to call yourself a nurse, this is what you must learn to do. This is nursing.” Thanks for loving, caring, praying, and giving. Remember, there’s always “Victory in Jesus!” Dr. Jean for the Youngs
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 04:49:34 +0000
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