I hope I’m not too late to celebrate National Nurses Week. While its origin may lie in an economic desire to give nurses balloons and fancy cupcakes instead of the pay raises they richly deserve, this paean to these expert caregivers comes from the heart, not a card rack.

It also comes from experience. I’m a retired hospital chaplain who used to work nights, which meant I saw serious trauma patients and heart attack victims, many of them getting chest compressions as they were wheeled in. Full disclosure: I’m married to a retired pediatric nurse. But my most recent experience was different. I sat for eight hours in an emergency room with my retired nurse, who was in need of emergency attention.

Anyone unaware of the depth and variety of human suffering or in need of a refresher course should spend a few hours in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. The sick come stumbling in. They’re not steady, but the pace of their arrival is. They are greeted by calm intake clerks and patient care technicians and nurses who assess them, sorting the more from the less sick because there are only so many rooms in the ER and so many staff and tests take a while to order and perform and diagnosis takes another while and the ambulances are bringing in more patients via another entrance. We are only seeing the walking wounded. 

My husband is one of the less sick, so our wait is long but at least we’re in the right place if he gets worse and thank God he doesn’t have kidney stones like that lady and it makes sense to attend immediately in the gentleman who slides out of his wheelchair as he moans from back and leg pain and his wife stands next to him in sharp-voiced distress as four staff load him carefully onto a gurney. 

“It’s always like this,” a patient care tech whom I know tells me. I worked within the emergency room on the wheel-in side. I spent little time on the walk-in admissions and assessment side, where the undifferentiated afflicted are triaged according to need of immediate attention. Seeing this stream of mobile sick people is eye- and heart-opening. I remember my own coping mechanism for responding to other people’s pain: these people are in the right place, they will get the care they need. 

I do what I used to do: I pray silently for the people I am sitting among, the kidney stone lady and the man in pain. But I also pray silently for the staff, as they ask the same screening questions over and over, sometimes loudly to the aged or drowsy. Intake staff need machines to interpret different languages, triage nurses are calling other departments to schedule diagnostic tests, they’re keeping track of who needs what where when. It can take a long time to find your nurse but the nurse knows you and finds your information quickly and knows just who to talk to. “I’ll be back in five minutes” in an emergency room inevitably means 15 minutes, but the answer will come. 

This is a workplace that sets the standard for “fast-paced.” Everybody wears athletic shoes. It’s rare to find a gray-haired staffer, though the ranks include some long-timers. Most of the staff look like they spend their days off in the health club keeping their 30-to-35-old bodies in prime condition. Only the doctors look a little more weathered. 

Eventually my husband is given a bed in the emergency room, but after a lengthy initial wait we don’t stay there long. Tests and assessment have found nothing life-threatening, and there’s a follow-up test scheduled in three days. Day shift has been replaced by night staff. Nobody walks into an emergency room at night if they can wait until the next day, so the pace is different, with fewer but sicker, can’t-wait-until-tomorrow patients. 

I told someone that nurses were my heroes. I may be prejudiced, but one definition of hero is someone who saves lives, which happens every day in hospitals. 

Blessings and gratitude.