Thank you to all the nurses on this planet

[fresh_42]

I am not sure whether this thread will get many responses, nor am I sure that any nurse will ever see it. Maybe @Greg Bernhardt can promote it on facebook. Anyway, I strongly feel the urgent need to acknowledge what they all do for us.

I had the chance to closely observe the work nurses have to fulfill. Due to a small surgery my hospital stay covered 28 hours which gave me a good impression of one full day's workload - night included. I do not know how it is elsewhere in this world, but nurses are not really adequately paid here. Even the glamor goes to the doctors, sometimes the clinic. Combined all examinations, I get at most 2 hours of work for doctors in my case, but 2 days of work for the nurses all in all. They are always present, enormously patient, friendly, and have to deal with people they do not understand, people who do not understand them, often in a language which isn't their native one, people who cannot hear, or see very well, people who bring in unnecessary stress, and so on. And they deal with strangers who leave their lives quickly and forever, while pretending this was not the case. I have had the chance to take a closer look, and since my surgery was no severe one, I could do few other things than observe.

This all holds true for the normal business as usual. And now we have Covid19-SARS2 on top of it all. Means: our nurses are permanently exposed to the danger of an infection; many thousand times as likely as you and me. Hence I only wanted to say

Thank you to all the nurses on this planet!
​

We are talking about Corona in all its variants, and in many threads. I thought a thread which talks about those who are primarily dealing with this crisis would be a good idea. Maybe you have similar experiences, relatives or friends who work as nurses, so that you could add some insights from their perspective.

 

[mcastillo356]

I will tell my sister, midwife. Thanks!

 

[berkeman]

Yeah, I've had the pleasure to work with lots of nurses in lots of different situations/venues over the years, and they are awesome. Whether it's in a regular hospital, or in the dark, in the rain, in a field hospital treating patients ("austere medicine"), they really make it all work.

 

[BillTre]

I think that most people who are involved in hospitals and health care realize what you are saying is correct.
I spend a lot of time in a local hospital and the nurses (and orderlies) are usually outstanding in many ways.
They get all the jobs (some kind of nasty) that have to be done and which doctors are not going to be doing.

WRT covid, I think things are much better controlled (due to better understanding of the disease) in hospitals (at least the ones I go to) than they were initially.
I feel safer now in the hospital environment than I do in a lot of other commercial places. People's behavior and procedures in the hospitals should prevent it from spreading.