This National Nurses Week we celebrated by honoring nurses all across the country for their compassion and relentless commitment to care for those in need.
We continued our annual tradition of bringing cookies to all of our nurses, which prompted — as always — laughs, smiles, and even some high fives. Nurses deserve cookies everyday. We also had the opportunity to speak with nurses that use Hourly Rounding about why they got into nursing and what their most memorable moments have been since they began their careers.
"One of my favorite parts about being a nurse is taking care of a patient for several days and seeing them get better, and maybe being able to send them home. I love seeing them so happy about being better, and they’re usually really grateful. I think it’s really fun to see the patient get better." -Emily Holmes, RN
"When I was a nurse aid, I worked on the same floor that I do now, so I’ve always been in the surgical, acute care setting. I guess what tipped me off was one day when I had to step in and help perform a lot of nurse care for a patient who was having a lot of health issues develop quickly, so I had to start CPR and assist the doctors. I was like you know what, I’m just gonna go to nursing school because if this is what I’m going to do, I’m gonna do it." -Rawla Walker, RN
“There was a patient who came in with back pain, and it ended up being that he had cancer. It was a big shock. By the time he left he was pretty much paralyzed. We became really close. I’d go in and talk to him about what was going through his head with learning he had cancer.”-Abby Batrell, RN
"It’s kind of a sappy story. My Grandma was a pediatric nurse here in Lincoln, and she died at the age of 59 of cancer. I was 15 at the time, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So her funeral—it was a massive funeral with like 300 people—we greeted everyone as family but we didn’t know a lot of the people. Talking with them, we learned that a lot of them had been patients of her’s, and that sparked my interest, knowing that I could make the much of a difference." -Kelsey Lambley, RN
"I didn’t know I wanted to be a nurse until I got to high school. Actually growing up I changed my mind all the time. I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a marine-biologist . . . I don’t have family that’s in nursing but nursing just came to me and it stuck—I never changed my mind. I love people. I love being around people. I love helping people, and I figured that would be a great way to help people. It’s never a boring day; it’s never the same, same, same. It’s always different, which is good." -Nicole Espinosa, RN