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Nurse Stories, Part Fourteen: Do Your Best...(By Julie "Jules" Montanegra, R.N.) by Karen Lynn Vidra, The Texas Tornado
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Rated "PG" by the Author.
A nurse shares her story and how she feels about the nursing profession as a whole.
I am a nurse, one of maybe over 100 here at NMH (Nashville Memorial Hospital) here in Nashville, Tennessee, where I live and work.
My name is Julie ("Jules") Martina Montanegra, and I am in my 50's. I have greying hair, brown-gold eyes, and olive-tanned skin. As you can probably surmise from my surname, I am Hispanic, but only by marriage. My maiden name is Going. I am married to a sportswriter for the Nashville Banner (my husband's name is Rance), and we have three kids, two grown (Rance, Jr., and Ginger), and one still left at home (Oscar). Oscar is our baby; he is now 15 years old, and is growing so tall! We live in a comfortable, Spanish-style house on Twin Rivers Lane, and we have two dogs, both Rottweilers, named "Samson" and "Delilah". I have been a nurse going on for 15 years now, and ten of those 15 years have been spent here at Nashville Mem, as we nurses call our "beloved" institution.
I work at different units at the hospital: I have worked everywhere from Emergency Medicine, to Post Surgical, from Pediatrics and Neonatal Intensive Care to Psych, from Orthopedics to Oncology (Cancer), from Pulmonary and Cardiac Medicine to Hospice...and everywhere in between. About the only thing I HAVEN'T done is work in P.T. or Housekeeping. I have seen and heard it all, and I have seen many a nurse come and go (and some, like Louisiana Sandusky, my boss, stay like an old familiar friend). I have seen death and life on a daily basis, and I have seen injustice happen in our hospital when steps should have been taken to prevent it from occurring. I have seen some of the wackiest cases imaginable, as well as the most heartrending and tragic cases that still stick with me years later. I have also had some rather humorous moments during my long tenure as a nurse, and I remember these light-hearted moments with much fondness because in a hospital setting, there is not much time for laughter or cutting up and acting stupid. We deal with the sick and dying, and no matter how hard we try, we lose some, and we win some, and death is a hard fact that we have to learn to get used to and to accept.
I have taken care of the neonate from the elderly, and I have seen all sorts of people come through our hospital: bratty kids, crying babies, scared and unsure teenagers, belligerent men and women high on drugs or alcohol, crazed maniacs who have gone off the deep end, frail old people who look like they should have died long ago (but by some fluke of nature, they manage to keep on going and going, just like the Energizer Bunny! LOL), and so much more. Each day here is so different from the day before, and you never seem to get the same thing twice (sometimes you do, but that isn't very often). You never know what you will get that comes through our hospital doors, and you never know what will happen.
I have enjoyed my job as a RN here, and I have learned so much. I enjoy the satisfying feeling I get whenever we save a life back from the brink of death, and I have cried buckets of tears when we lose a life; and I hope to offer more years of valuable service here at Nashville Memorial Hospital.
~Written by Julie "Jules" Montanegra, R.N., on Tuesday, July 20, 2004, at 4:27 p.m., C.S.T.
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I am a nurse, one of maybe over 100 here at NMH (Nashville Memorial Hospital) here in Nashville, Tennessee, where I live and work.
