My name is Jack T. Munoz.  I am a nurse.  I work at a large metropolitan hospital; have worked there going on for ten years now.  I have seen and dealt with more than what most people do in a lifetime.

I usually work in the E.R., but lately I have been a "floater": working wherever I am needed.  Lately it's been with the children, on the pediatric's ward.  It's okay, but to tell you the truth, I hate to see kids sick or suffering; this should never be!

In addition to working with the kids, I've worked with elderly patients in nursing homes or on the "geriatric" wing, where all the patients are sixty or older, with teenagers on the psych floor (that was intimidating at times), and with critically ill adults on the medical floor.  Each group has brought with them all sorts of challenges.

The worst thing that can happen to me is when patients suddenly take a turn for the worse and then die, even despite your best efforts.  We try to save each person but that is impossible. 

People live, and people die.  It's part of the life process; you can't save everybody.

I have performed CPR on newborn infants, holding their limp little bodies in my arms, and gently pressing on their chest with my fingers, alternately breathing into their mouth, in order to get life-saving air to their still lungs, fought back nausea as I remove dead, diseased tissue from a person riddled with a rare, deadly flesh-eating disease, and try to talk calmly to a big bruiser of a man who has suddenly gone whacko on me in the emergency room, hoping he doesn't kill me first.

I have had to hold a whimpering little boy with a terminal disease while he gets a chest tube shoved into his side and knowing there is nothing I can do to alleviate the pain it causes him, and I have had to deal with a little girl screaming in my ear as they take blood from an artery in her groin for tests, to see how well she is oxygenating, and have had a woman screaming at me in Spanish while she watches me crack her husband's chest open in order to manually massage his heart with my hands, which has stopped beating.

I have seen and experienced more heartache in these ten years; one wonders why I just don't give it all up.  Nursing as a rule can wear out even the most seasoned of veterans; it is not an easy job, especially when one deals with people who don't take care of themselves or people who are sick, dying, or injured.  Being sick or injured can definitely bring out the beast in a person, no matter how old (or how young) they happen to be.

On the other hand, when I hear the sigh of a person as they resume breathing, or see a comatose patient open his eyes for the first time in as many months, or hear the cry of a newborn babe, well, then, all the bad memories suddenly disappear as I thank God for what I do and knowing that I was instrumental in helping save somebody's life. 

If it were not for me or my fellow nurses, that person who might have otherwise died may have never had a second chance at life.  So I am glad to be a nurse; it makes my job worthwhile, even with all the shit that I have to put up with on a daily basis.

~Jack T. Munoz, R.N., Nashville, Tennessee.