Nurse Front Line Quotes

I realized that every healthcare professional — every single doctor, nurse, midwife, pharmacist, physical therapist, and paramedic — need to shout out about the reality of their work so the next time the health secretary lies that doctors are in it for the money, the public will know just how ridiculous that is. Why would any sane person do that job for anything other than the right reasons, because I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I have so much respect for those who work on the front line because, when it came down to it, I certainly couldn’t.

In the middle of the room was the bed where he had lain after that bullet found his neck near the Piave River front. It was a stupid attack; they had walked right into it.But Daniel had only enlisted in the war because Lucia was a nurse, so it was just as well. He rubbed at the place where he'd been hit. He could feel the pain almost as if it had happened yesterday. If Daniel had stuck around long enough to let the wound heal, the doctors would have been amazed by the absence of a scar. Today,his neck was smooth and flawless,as if he had never been shot. Over the years,Daniel had been beaten, battered, flung over balconies, shot in the neck and the gut and the leg,tortured over hot coals, and dragged through a dozen city streets. But a close study of every inch of his skin would reveal only two small scars: two fine white lines above his shoulder blades where his wings unfurled. All of the fallen angels acquired these scars when they took their human bodies. In a way,the scars were all any of them had to show for themselves.

By the front door is a table normally used for mail and car keys. On it sits a single sheet of paper bearing six typed lines. Holding my breath, I pick it up and begin to read. At sixty-nine, Virginia Hope Wrote her nurse this little note Thank you, dear, for saving me Now it’s time to let you be I take my leave, walking tall Knowing that I fooled them all

We heard engines, and suddenly there were Jeeps in the courtyard, and these huge American fellows, like giants, with their Thompson guns over their shoulders, were already making friends with our nurses. I don’t know whether the Americans put their tallest men in the front line, or if this was by coincidence, but these fellows were close to two metres tall, all of them.

The nurse smiled and gestured to two cameras pointing at each patient—one to monitor the patient himself, the other to observe the charts. The nurse told us that these were fed by Skype directly into the intensive care unit in one of the hospitals in Washington, DC, where there was a Syrian-American ICU specialist looking at the monitors twenty-four hours a day, and adjusting the patient’s medication and ventilation based on the clinical parameters.

But perhaps the best and most memorable way to explain the conflict that arose between honoring traditional honor, and honoring one’s individual psyche, can be conveyed in a story from World War II. In 1943, coming off his dazzling victories in the Sicily campaign, George S. Patton stopped by a medical tent to visit with the wounded. He enjoyed these visits, and so did the soldiers and staff. He would hand out Purple Hearts, pump the men full of encouragement, and offer rousing speeches to the nurses, interns, and their patients that were so touching in nature they sometimes brought tears to many of the eyes in the room. On this particular occasion, as Patton entered the tent all the men jumped to attention except for one, Private Charles H. Kuhl, who sat slouched on a stool. Kuhl, who showed no outward injuries, was asked by Patton how he was wounded, to which the private replied, “I guess I just can’t take it.” Patton did not believe “battle fatigue” or “shell-shock” was a real condition nor an excuse to be given medical treatment, and had recently been told by one of the commanders of Kuhl’s division that, “The front lines seem to be thinning out. There seems to be a very large number of ‘malingerers’ at the hospitals, feigning illness in order to avoid combat duty.” He became livid. Patton slapped Kuhl across the face with his gloves, grabbed him by his collar, and led him outside the tent. Kicking him in the backside, Patton demanded that this “gutless bastard” not be admitted and instead be sent back to the front to fight. A week later, Patton slapped another soldier at a hospital, who, in tears, told the general he was there because of “his nerves,” and that he simply couldn’t “stand the shelling anymore.” Enraged, Patton brandished his white-handled, single-action Colt revolver and bellowed: Your nerves, Hell, you are just a goddamned coward, you yellow son of a bitch. Shut up that goddamned crying. I won’t have these brave men here who have been shot seeing a yellow bastard sitting here crying…You’re a disgrace to the Army and you’re going back to the front lines and you may get shot and killed, but you’re going to fight. If you don’t I’ll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose. In fact I ought to shoot you myself, you God-damned whimpering coward.

I was on my own to cover the hundreds of patients there, some of the sickest of the sick. It was on one of those nights that, staggering through a sleep-deprived haze, I got the call. Up until then, all the deaths I had seen were those in which the patient was either dead on arrival or had died during cardiac “codes,” when we try desperately, and nearly always unsuccessfully, to resuscitate. This man was different. He was wide-eyed, gasping for air, his cuffed hands clawing at the bed. The cancer was filling up his lungs with fluid. He was being drowned by lung cancer. While he thrashed desperately, pleading, my mind was in medical mode, all protocols and procedures, but nothing much could be done. The man needed morphine, but that was held on the other side of the ward, and I’d never get to it in time, let alone back to him. I was not popular on the prison floor. I had once reported a guard for beating a sick inmate and was rewarded with death threats. There was no way they’d let me through the gates fast enough. I begged the nurse to try to get some, but she didn’t make it back in time. The man’s coughing turned to gurgling. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I said. Immediately, I thought, What a stupid thing to say to someone choking to death. Just another lie in probably a long line of condescension from other authority figures throughout his life. Helpless, I turned from doctor back to human being. I took his hand in my own, which he then gripped with all his might, tugging me toward his tear-streaked, panic-stricken face. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m right here.” Our gaze remained locked as he suffocated right in front of me. It felt like watching someone being tortured to death. Take a deep breath. Now imagine what it would feel like not to be able to breathe. We all need to take care of our lungs.

Alex whispers, “There’s a thin line between love and hate. Maybe you’re confusing your emotions.” I scoot away from him. “I wouldn’t bet on it.” “I would.” Alex’s gaze turns toward the door to the classroom. Through the window, his friend is waving to him. They’re probably going to ditch class. Alex grabs his books and stands. Mrs. Peterson turns around. “Alex, sit down.” “I got to piss.” The teacher’s eyebrows furrow and her hand goes to her hip. “Watch your language. And the last time I checked, you don’t need your books in order to go to the restroom. Put them back on the lab table.” Alex’s lips are tight, but he places the books back on the table. “I told you no gang-related items in my class,” Mrs. Peterson says, staring at the bandanna he’s holding in front of him. She holds out her hand. “Hand it over.” He glances at the door, then faces Mrs. Peterson. “What if I refuse?” “Alex, don’t test me. Zero tolerance. You want a suspension?” She wiggles her fingers, signaling to hand the bandana over immediately or else. Scowling, he slowly places the bandana in her hand. Mrs. Peterson sucks in her breath when she snatches the bandanna from his fingers. I screech, “Ohmygod!” at the sight of the big stain on his crotch. The students, one by one, start laughing. Colin laughs the loudest. “Don’t sweat it, Fuentes. My great-grandma has the same problem. Nothing a diaper won’t fix.” Now that hits home because at the mention of adult diapers, I immediately think of my sister. Making fun of adults who can’t help themselves isn’t funny because Shelley is one of those people. Alex sports a big, cocky grin and says to Colin, “Your girlfriend couldn’t keep her hands out of my pants. She was showin’ me a whole new definition of hand warmers, compa.” This time he’s gone too far. I stand up, my stool scraping the floor. “You wish,” I say. Alex is about to say something to me when Mrs. Peterson yells, “Alex!” She clears her throat. “Go to the nurse and…fix yourself. Take your books, because afterward you’ll be seeing Dr. Aguirre. I’ll meet you in his office with your friends Colin and Brittany.” Alex swipes his books off the table and exits the classroom while I ease back onto my stool. While Mrs. Peterson is trying to calm the rest of the class, I think about my short-lived success in avoiding Carmen Sanchez. If she thinks I’m a threat to her relationship with Alex, the rumors that are sure to spread today could prove deadly.

No one survives a war's front lines without ghosts clinging to them.

Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. With the mere cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression; at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. It was ghastly but it was not yet petty or monotonous. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before they enlisted. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. Yet the very absence of these pleasures created another scale of values. They had a sharp and enormous appetite for the smallest things. Bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy. To get away from the flies, to wash the dust from one’s eyes and mouth, to feel cool again: this was a heightening of sensation which, for the moment, went beyond their dreams of home. The brewing of tea in the evening, the sharing out of a parcel, a cake or a bar of chocolate, the long talks in the starlight talking of what they would do ‘when it was all over’—all these things took on an almost mystical emphasis of a kind that became familiar enough in the western desert of Egypt in the second world war, or indeed on any distant front in any war. There were no pin-up girls; no erotic magazines reached them—they were lucky if they even saw a newspaper from home that was under a month old—and there were no nurses or Ensa troupes. Perhaps because of this the sexual instinct seems to have been held in abeyance for the time, or rather it was absorbed in the minutiae of their intensely friendly life, the generous feelings created by the danger all around them. There was very little vice; ordinary crimes became lost in the innocence of the crime of war itself. Certainly there was no possibility of drunkenness,22 and gambling was not much more than an anaemic pastime in a world where money was the least of things. They craved not soft beds and hot baths but mosquito nets and salt water soap.

The reason the Lampedusans are kind and good to these desperate visitors is because they can be. They've met them and they see them; the reason we can talk about "them" as a problem, a plague on our border, is because we don't see them. If any of these refugees knocked on any of our front door and asked for help, we would give it. We would insist they be protected and offered a chance to be doctors and civil engineers, nurses and journalists. We would do it because we are also good and kind. It is only by not looking, by turning our backs, that we can sail away and think this is sad, but it is not our sadness.

She’d always had a taste for luxury (this was the woman who had brought her servants and a bathtub to the front lines while serving as a nurse in World War I),

In no other profession do people float ably among specialties, helping to ease babies into being, escorting men and women gently into death, and heroically resurrecting patients in between. There are few other careers in which people are so devoted to a noble purpose that they work twelve, fourteen, sixteen straight hours without eating, sleeping, or taking breaks and often without cmomensurate pay simply because they believe in the importance of their job. They are frequently the first responders on the front lines of malady and contagion, risking their own health to improve someone else's. Nursing is more than a career; it is a calling.

I also think it might be possible that we’re causing this activity to spike because of the pervasive fear and anxiety we are experiencing during the coronavirus crisis. To me, what’s happening right now is almost like one massive intention experiment. There are billions of people right now in a perpetual state of anxiety and stress, and all of that energy adds up. People have died alone. People have lost loved ones and not been able to gather with family to say goodbye. The elderly, isolated in nursing homes and care facilities, have not been able to see their families in what could be the last months of their lives. Others, working on the front lines, have gone into work every day knowing they are putting themselves and their families at risk, but they have no choice but to go.

cops aren’t blamed for our country’s crime problems, firefighters for our safety problems, nurses for our health problems, or trash collectors for our environmental problems. So why are teachers being blamed for our education problems?