The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital (45 page)

The ER doctor told the woman to follow up with her cardiologist, and ordered some Ativan to calm her down. Sam could hear through the curtain from the next patient area as the woman explained her fears to her husband. The patient was upset because she was under stress at work, which was leading to a cycle of increasing SVT episodes. She did not want to take Ativan. Sam guessed that the doctor had not adequately described the patient’s condition and treatment.

So she popped in to talk to the patient. “I thought you could use some more information,” Sam said. “Stress can activate a vicious cycle: You get stressed out, you get SVT, and that makes you even more stressed. So I can only imagine how stressed you are.”

The woman nodded.

“If I were given the option, I would take a really small dose of Ativan just to bring the stress down a notch. It could break the cycle,” Sam continued. She explained that Ativan wouldn’t affect the woman’s heart rate, but was intended to calm her so that her heart wouldn’t start racing again. She answered the couple’s questions and talked to them for ten minutes.

Sam was not a warm, fuzzy nurse. She probably never would be. In her opinion, giving a patient “all the information is more calming to someone than patting them on the head like, ‘There, there dear.’ ” By giving the couple thorough information about SVT and Ativan, she was hoping to provide them with “every tool they needed to make a good decision.”

The woman agreed to try the Ativan. As Sam walked away to retrieve it, she overheard the woman say to her husband, “She’s awesome. She gets it!”

Sam paused in the hallway for a moment to collect herself while her eyes filled with tears. She explained, “I think it meant so much to me because it wasn’t intended for me to hear. This is why I got into nursing. I was able to talk to her like a human being and help her understand what we were trying to do. There’s a different sense of satisfaction than when you work on an interesting trauma patient. With most traumas, you’re using your brain on a clinical and tasky level but you don’t really interact with the patient. Anyway, it was the nicest compliment.”

Sam had assumed she needed to become a nurse practitioner in order to gain universal respect within the medical industry. As she said, “It’s been my mission to make doctors and laypeople realize this isn’t our grandmothers’ nursing. I don’t wear white and I sure as hell don’t stand up when a doctor enters the room.”

Now, after a year as a nurse, she could see that she didn’t need the doctors’ validation. Rather than view ER nursing as a stepping-stone toward a more prestigious degree, she knew that her job was about healing. She also didn’t need patients’ respect. Sam was a nurse to save patients’ lives, not to convince them to appreciate her. But oh, what a difference it made when they did.

Juliette hesitated in front of the broad automatic doors of the Eastgreen ER, where she had landed permanently following eight weeks of agency work. After working full-time for a few months at Eastgreen, a hospital with a good reputation and a varied patient load, she had arranged a two-week unpaid vacation to spend quality time with her husband and daughter. Now, as she prepared to resume working, she remembered when she had returned to Pines after a three-week vacation and no nurses other than Molly had welcomed her back.

Eastgreen, which was not far from Juliette’s home, had a much larger ER, with twice the number of Pines’ staff. Juliette couldn’t help but wonder if some of her new coworkers had already forgotten her name. Thus far, the experience at Eastgreen already outclassed Pines. Most of the nurses Juliette had worked with were courteous. Unlike at Pines, Eastgreen nurses were diverse; they ranged in age, race, looks, weight, sexuality, and numbers of tattoos and piercings. The charge nurses made a point of thanking nurses who worked hard, like Juliette.

Socially, Juliette and several coworkers had started a book club. She was friendly with one of the ER doctors, and she had traded dog-sitting days with another colleague. A group of nurses had even invited Juliette to go on a whale-watching trip.

Despite all of this, Juliette worried about how they would react when she returned. After all, she had trusted Priscilla, but her judgment had been wrong. She took a breath and entered the ER. The first tech who saw her gave her a hug. “Juliette, we missed you!” she said.

At the nurses station, the nurse manager stopped her. “I’m so glad you’re here! How was your vacation?”

“Juliette’s back?” asked the ER doctor, looking up from his computer. “Hey, I got a new puppy! Come here and see the video.”

The nurse manager read Juliette a compliment from a patient evaluation that had come in while she was gone. The patient had written that she knew how busy ERs were. “Juliette took great care of us,” the patient said. “It made such a difference with our stay and we just want to acknowledge the care we received.”

Juliette beamed. Eastgreen wasn’t perfect. There were social groups that she wasn’t a part of, and staff members who were unhelpful. But already, she felt more comfortable at work than she ever was at Pines.

The day before the surgery, Lara couldn’t stop thinking about the drugs.
Remember how shitty you felt when you were trying to get clean?
she pleaded with herself.
You don’t ever want to feel that way again. Don’t do this to your kids
.

Frightened that she would succumb to temptation, Lara went to an NA meeting and shared: “I’m going to have surgery and I’m kind of excited about getting my stomach muscle cut open because then I’ll need Percocet.” She was embarrassed, but the response was immediate. “It’s cool you’re making yourself accountable by telling us,” a man told her.

“Who do you have to hold your medicine?” a woman asked.

“I guess my ex-husband,” Lara said. He was the only adult whom she saw every day. She would be most accountable to him because he was watching their kids.

“Do you want me to drive you to a meeting?” asked someone else.

Lara had mixed feelings. She had been eager for the meds, and now a little voice scolded her,
You just ruined your chance
. But her relief that her NA network would not allow her to relapse offset her disappointment. Quickly, she told several people about the surgery so that they would watch out for her. But even up until the moment of the operation, Lara was scared by how thrilled she was to get cut open because she would get high.

•   •   •

When she woke up, Lara was giddy on her post-op pain medication. After John drove her home, Lara called in her Percocet prescription. Still high from the surgery, she decided to drive the three miles to the pharmacy herself although driving so soon after surgery was inadvisable.

Lara picked up the prescription and three bags of chicken from the restaurant next door. She balanced everything on top of the car while she gently opened the door, careful not to strain her surgery site, then loaded the chicken into the trunk. As she backed out of her parking spot, she heard a crunch. She glanced in her rearview mirror, saw nothing unusual, shrugged, and drove back to John’s. After dinner, she went to her car to get the Percocet. Her plan was to keep two pills at home and give the rest to John to hold for safekeeping. The prescription wasn’t in the car.

He took them from me!
Lara thought. She tore into the house, where she found John in the den. “Are you messing with me? Where’s the Percocet?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” John asked.

“The pain pills aren’t there! Did you take them?” she asked, panicking.

“Are you hiding them?” John asked.

Lara immediately felt guilty. Had she hidden them? She didn’t remember handling them, but she was still slightly loopy.
This doesn’t look very good
, she thought.
They’re magically not there after I said I got them?

“Maybe your brother took them,” John said. “Maybe they fell out of the car.”

As she argued with her ex-husband, Lara remembered the strange crunching sound outside of the pharmacy.
Oh no
, she thought.
No way
.

She drove back to the parking lot and found the crushed bag. “No! No, no, no!” she shouted. Lara’s surgery site was now hurting so badly that she legitimately needed the Percocet. She scooped up the bag. The pills were pulverized, crushed into the shattered plastic they’d come in.
I can’t believe I ran over my pain medicine
.

Back in her car, Lara leaned her head on the steering wheel. It figured. The one time that she truly needed legally prescribed Percocet, she had accidentally destroyed the pills. She took a picture of the pills for evidence. Then she reconsidered.
There is no way in hell I’m going to call the doctor’s office and tell them a) I was driving and b) I ran over my medicine and I need more
, she thought. Later, she explained, “People come up with the most ridiculous stories to get pills. So I had to deal with having no pain medicine because I was too embarrassed to call the doctor and have them thinking I was drug-seeking.”

At home, Lara struggled through the agony and fought the urge to hunt down narcotics. Without her two major outlets—work and exercise, both of which were forbidden—she was lost. It rained every day. When the kids were home, she focused intently on taking care of them. When they were in school, she rested or watched TV, trying to ignore the pain in her stomach and the battle in her mind.

A few days into one of the hardest weeks of her life, Lara was sitting alone, tears streaming down her face because of the sharp pains. She couldn’t take the hurt any longer.
I can send the doctor the picture to show that I’m not making this up
, she thought. She picked up the phone to call his office. “Oh my God, you’re going to look like you’re crazy because you took the picture in the first place,” she told herself. “Forget it.”
But the pills will take you out of this funk
, a little voice nagged. She started to dial. “The pills aren’t going to take you out of the funk. You’ll get a little buzz, you’ll enjoy it, and then you’ll be going at it again.” She hung up the phone.
How am I going to get through this?

For the next week, Lara refused to allow herself to think beyond the present moment. Forget day by day. Lara asked herself only, “What am I going to do right now?” Embarrassed and determined “not to be a drama queen,” she didn’t tell most of her friends about her predicament. But the people she did tell rushed to her aid. Angie, her former coworker and roommate, checked in with her regularly. Molly and Juliette brought her meals. Another nurse friend helped get the children through their nightly homework and bath routine. Friends from NA drove her to meetings every night; one even found a meeting site with no stairs so that Lara would strain her abdomen as little as possible. The South General ER nurses, who knew nothing about Lara’s addiction, sent a get-well basket with flowers and candy. Rose, Holly, and Brianne had tucked in personal notes.

Four weeks later, Lara was back in the gym. She was profoundly proud that she had recovered without being seduced by narcotics. She believed she could get through anything now: overwhelmingly busy days, single motherhood, maybe even dating. She would not be presumptuous enough to assume she had beaten her demons; NA meetings were a reminder that the disease was waiting for her, that just one slip-up would send her back into its arms. So she accepted what she called “a healthy fear,” which she would live with, always, because of the mistakes she’d made in the past.

Why did Lara return to ER nursing, the worst possible job for her addiction—tempting her with narcotics to administer, to throw out, to watch other nurses steal? “Because being a nurse is my passion,” she said. “When all my struggles were going on, my biggest fear was that nursing would be taken away from me. It truly makes me happy.”

For Lara, being a good nurse also made her feel like a good mother. “As a nurse, I feel strong, like I can protect my children. Because of my medical knowledge, I know when something’s not right with them,” she said. “Every parent wants to feel like they’re keeping their kids as safe as possible. As a nurse I can make sure my kids are safe. And nursing pays pretty well, so my kids and I will be okay. It’s not easy supporting the family by myself, but I will make this happen.”

Lara wanted other nurses to know there is hope, help, and life after addiction. “You can get help and you don’t have to feel like this ever again, like you’re never going to laugh again, never going to feel good,” she said. “It does get better and you can do this clean. You can do anything clean.”

She had proven that to herself repeatedly over the past year. But now she finally believed it.

Two weeks after Molly’s IVF, she decided to take a home pregnancy test, even though she had read that because of the hormones in the ovulation trigger shot, urine pregnancy tests could result in a false positive. She tried to wait for Trey, who was finishing a night shift, but the test instructions said to use her first morning urine, and Molly couldn’t hold it any longer.

She stared at the stick as she waited for the three minutes to pass. The test line slowly began to develop, like an old Polaroid picture sharpening into focus. And—was she imagining it or was a second line forming, too? She tried not to get her hopes up, but she allowed a tiny string of excitement to loop around her heart.

The next day, after Molly’s official blood draw at the clinic, her nurse, Jennifer, called her at home. “Molly! Molly, Molly, Molly!”

“Jennifer! Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer!”

“Sorry! I was so excited I couldn’t get it out. It’s just so great to say this nurse to nurse. I have great news for you! You’re pregnant!”

“Hooray!” Molly whooped. She wanted to shout from the rooftop. She was ecstatic that something she had wanted so strongly for so many years would finally come to pass. Her mother had been such a fabulous mom. Molly’s best memories of her had nothing to do with “fancy activities,” she said, but centered on simply being together, much like her mother’s nurse coworkers had written to Molly about how dearly they cherished simply being with her. Molly got choked up thinking about how she would now be able to build on those memories with her own son or daughter.