I have no idea what I'm doing!
Hero.
(noun) A man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds or noble qualities.
Two years ago I had the privilege of traveling to Hershey, PA to accept an award from Bayada Home Health Care as their National RN Hero of the Year. I was skeptical of their decision but it got me thinking: What defines a hero? It seems to me a hero is just an average person with a cause to champion; the greater the cause - and the greater the sacrifice - the more we revere and honor the person. I’ve been thinking about heroes, what makes a hero. I’m thinking about what makes nurses the most trusted of all professionals, and how did I become one?
I decided early on that the
world was too wide and rich to stick with one career so I dedicated my life to
experiencing as much as I could while still making a difference. If I had to pick just one thing, I wanted to
guide wilderness trips, to spend as much time as I could in the woods and
educate others to love it like I did while stretching beyond their comfort zone
and accomplishing things they didn’t think they could – experiential learning
in a perceived risk environment. Health
care never once crossed my mind until I realized that wilderness guides live far below poverty level.
In twenty years of
wandering I’ve learned that there are lucrative jobs, jobs with family time,
and fulfilling jobs. It’s rare to find a
job with all three, but nursing is, in my mind, the best balance of these, and is, perhaps, the perfect job for those poor
souls burdened with a savior complex. It’s
also, at least in institutional medicine, becoming nauseatingly unrecognizable:
unsafe ratios, increasingly complex regulations, a greater focus on compliance
than care, revenue-generating policies that increase patient risk - all sweating under that relentless sword of Damocles, “Patient Satisfaction Scores”. This is why I love
home health care - it’s everything institutional medicine isn’t, and it allows you to work with true
heroes - those who are down, but not out.
The client I’ve been taking care of for six years still blows my mind: the things he’s overcome and the limitations he faces every minute of every day stagger me. But he cheerfully carries on, developing the only thing he can, his brain, and sharing what he’s learned with others, making a difference for nurses and Medicaid recipients throughout NC. He thinks I'm a hero, but he’s what I consider a hero – a man of distinguished courage or ability, who’s admired for his brave deeds, or noble qualities. When I first met him, I had no idea what I was doing - I was stretched way out of my comfort zone. He guided me through a perceived-risk environment and I learned a fantastic amount from the experience. Funny thing: I never would have met him if I was a wilderness guide.
The client I’ve been taking care of for six years still blows my mind: the things he’s overcome and the limitations he faces every minute of every day stagger me. But he cheerfully carries on, developing the only thing he can, his brain, and sharing what he’s learned with others, making a difference for nurses and Medicaid recipients throughout NC. He thinks I'm a hero, but he’s what I consider a hero – a man of distinguished courage or ability, who’s admired for his brave deeds, or noble qualities. When I first met him, I had no idea what I was doing - I was stretched way out of my comfort zone. He guided me through a perceived-risk environment and I learned a fantastic amount from the experience. Funny thing: I never would have met him if I was a wilderness guide.
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