Nurses Offer Great Value to Healthcare

Abstract My decision to become a nurse was not a hard decision to make. It was instilled in me at a very young age. My mother, who was a nursing student, was diagnosed with liver cancer at the age of 18 years old. I was only two years old at that time. As I grew older and my mother became more ill I learned to how to care for her. One night my mother was in the shower when I heard a loud noise. I ran into the bathroom where she was and found her lying on the floor. She said she was weak and she fell. I immediately got on the telephone and called her eldest brother to ask for help. While waiting for him I took my mother a pillow and a blanket to make her comfortable. My mother told me that I needed to go to bed so I could get up for school the next morning and she would be fine until my uncle came. So before going to bed I needed to be sure I could hear her if she needed me so I gave her a bell that I had and told her not to yell, if she needed me to just ring the bell. When Mom was stronger she bragged to everyone about how her daughter was going to follow in her footsteps to become a nurse as she told them how I cared for her that night. Another situation that influenced me happened when I was nine years old. I awakened one morning to discover that my mother’s IV fluids had run empty. I’d remembered asking her one time what would happen if her bag would empty before the home care nurse came. Her response to me was “Air would get into my veins and I would probably die”. In remembering this I jumped out of bed while she was still sleeping and ran to the refrigerator and grabbed another bag and ran it under warm water as I had watched the nurse do so many times before. When the fluids were warm enough I got new IV tubing, primed it, and hooked it to her as the