The Heart Beat

I had a really great grandmother, who was a nurse. She was born in 1900 and became a nurse in the mid-40′s when she got displaced from a job inspecting planes on a Sea Bee base. She’d started there as a waitress in the canteen at the beginning of the war, then scored this job as the last of the men went off to fight, and the women filled their jobs. It’s funny; I never talked to her about the plane inspections, yet I am so proud of her for being a woman in a nontraditional job at a time when women had to rapidly learn to consider unusual options. You might say think “outside the box,” but I hate cliches.

When the war was over and the men came trickling home, women like my grandmother had to make other plans. The state began offering job-retraining programs, and through them she became an LPN. I still have her textbooks from school and as far back as I can remember I can recall reading her nursing textbooks when we went to visit on Sunday afternoons.

When I graduated from high school I was working as a certified nursing assistant (CNA). I started college at the “number one party school in the nation,” but to tell the truth it wasn’t the partying that made my grades rotten. It was just like high school; too many high school friends on campus and no real passion for anything. I left home and went to Virginia where I had family, and got another CNA job. On a ‘lost soul’ phone call home to grandma, she said to me, “I don’t know why you don’t go to nursing school; you love what you’re doing, and apparently your patients love you.” It was like getting hit in the head! Why didn’t I think of that?

It’s really interesting how fast one can get through school when food has to be put on the table! Grandma and I would chat regularly, and she’d tell me stories about being a nurse in a mental hospital in the 40′s and 50′s. Sorta like Cuckoo’s Nest, you know? It made us close, and because I admired her so much, I wanted to be like her. I developed into the kind of nurse I believed she was, caring and compassionate, a person who’d often go around the rules a bit to make things work for humans that needed her care.

My grandmother was bigger than life to me. By the time I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in nursing she was nearly 84 years old; we were still living 500 miles away from one another and I missed her so! Two years later my (now) husband and I moved home because I wanted to live near her again. She lived two more years and she passed on right after trout season “opening day” in April. She loved to fish, and lived for opening day. When I was a kid she’d take me fishing and impress me with her ability to recognize, and repeat, bird calls, so that they would “talk” back to her. When she died at the hospital where I worked I was “on duty,” as she used to say. She’d been ill for a while, and had made herself a “no code.” I remember the nursing supervisor coming to tell me, and I sat down right there in the hall and cried. Then I went to her room and opened the window as she’d told me she’d always done, to let her soul fly away.

When my father and uncles made arrangements for her burial one of my uncles decided that she should wear a certain dress; I objected on the grounds that she never wore that dress except on special occasions, and she was an individual who lived for comfort, not dress-up. No one would listen to me, and I got so frustrated that unbeknownst to the others my sister and I went to her house and got all her fishing gear: rod, hat, vest (complete with hand-tied flies), and waders, and took them to the funeral parlor (BTW, what kind of name is funeral parlor, or funeral home? Someone needs to explain that one to me). The director, a family friend, balked a bit, telling me that she was already in a dress! I told him to put the gear on over the dress if he needed to, but put it on. When funeral day came my sister and I had a bit of a time keeping a straight face in the receiving line, but it was worth it. Her casket was closed, with her “gone fishing” sign hanging on the outside.

Today, when people ask me, why did you become a nurse practitioner, why didn’t you just go medical school? I tell them it’s because nursing is in my bones, and it connects me to one of the most special women I have ever known. Here’s to you grandma, thanks for watching out for me.

Laurie

Related Topics: Many Patients Prefer Nurses to Doctors, Caregiver