Veteran nurse Sue Gregory is no stranger to working on Christmas, a role she’s volunteered for many times in her nearly 46 years at Parkridge Medical Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Gregory regularly works Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so that a nurse with young children is able to stay home and play Santa Claus, she said.
“Because they’re young only once, and that’s a thing that cannot be taken away from them — once they see them open their presents,” Gregory said.
But this year for Gregory is bittersweet, as Monday marks her last scheduled shift before retirement.
“When I came in today, I’m teary eyed,” she said during work Thursday. “Then I get over it for a while. I think of the good times and tell about how things used to be.”
Nursing looks vastly different today compared to when Gregory began her career. While she said it seems crazy by modern medical standards, she remembers using — and reusing — glass syringes, needles and metal bedpans that would be sterilized between patients.
“Then, that’s all we knew,” she said.
Not only are today’s needles much safer, but also much of the equipment is more sophisticated. For example, IVs and medication drips now automatically regulate, whereas nurses used to have to count and calculate the rate of each drip based on the doctor’s orders.
Notes and prescriptions are put into computers instead of everything being handwritten, and although the pace of care is faster, it’s also more specialized and coordinated, she said.
“Physical therapy, the dietitian, the doctors and the nurse will gather in a room, and they discuss each and every patient on the floor, and that way they can do better care for the patient,” Gregory said.
Gregory has worked on the medical-surgical floor for the past 30 years but said she tried many different areas of nursing, including labor and delivery, intensive care, home health, and surgery, before landing in her current role.
“I wanted to spread my wings, and I would recommend that to anybody that is going into nursing,” she said.
Though she enjoyed surgery, Gregory said she wanted a job that allowed her to get to know her patients.
“Med-surg is probably where I’ve landed because I love to communicate with people,” she said.
Gregory has been able to stick with nursing by staying positive and thinking about those who need her help, she said.
“It feels so good to see these people get better and go home,” Gregory said. “You just have to care for the ones that you are taking care of.”
The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were particularly difficult, she said, because many patients never got to go home. Gregory was the only nurse that stayed on her unit, which was converted to the COVID floor, when the pandemic started.
“It was a total nightmare,” Gregory said. “You’d be crying before you come to work. You’d be crying when you leave work. You don’t know which one’s going to die.”
Although it was quite different, Gregory said caring for patients at the height of the AIDs epidemic is the only experience that compares to the coronavirus pandemic.
For nurses experiencing burnout, she recommends trying new areas of the field over making a total career change.
“There’s so many things that you can do being a nurse — you don’t have to just work directly with the patients,” Gregory said.
In addition to getting her registered nurse license, the highlight of Gregory’s career happened about a month ago, when she was presented with a Daisy Award -- a nationwide program that recognizes nurses by collecting nominations from patients, families and co-workers.
“I still get emotional about it, because I can’t believe that I won such an honorable award,” she said.
Deborah Deal, Parkridge’s chief nursing executive, shared the following about Gregory in a post on the social media site LinkedIn:
“Being a Daisy award winner is one of the highest honors a nurse can achieve,” Deal wrote. “Sue is truly a wealth of knowledge, having seen everything in her career, and she is willing to share that experience with students and new nurses.
“One patient’s family said this about Sue, ‘She took great care of my father and just loved on him. Having caring nurses will always make the difference in patient care.’
“Another patient family member wrote that Sue knows her job and does it without fail. Thank you, Sue for being compassionate, professional and kind.”
Credit: Chattanooga Times Free Press
Credit: Chattanooga Times Free Press
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