Personal Narrative: My Job As A Trauma Nurse

The hospital is my comfort zone. I find peace in the number of miracles that happen there every day. When I was selected as a junior volunteer at Madison Hospital this summer, I was thrilled. This position was just what I needed to dip my feet into the professional side of the hospital and get a taste of my future profession. Little did I know, I would leave the hospital a better person at the end of the summer. My job was a simple one: working the surgery waiting desk. Answering the phone, updating families, and signing patients in for surgery were the jobs listed on my application, but my responsibilities entailed much more than that. As the main contact between the surgeons and patients’ families, I was the person responsible for telling a family member that something went wrong during surgery. Likewise, I was the person to share the
Working in the trauma pods of the emergency room, I never knew what to expect when a nurse yelled, “Incoming patient in 5 minutes!” Many patients with different backgrounds and injuries had already found themselves sitting in the cold, white rooms of the hospital when I heard the scream of an agitated patient in the hallway. A stranger had called an ambulance to come get her after she threatened to commit suicide in Walmart.
This was the first psychiatric patient I had encountered, and I had no clue how to properly handle a patient in her mental state. She was hostile, upset, and throwing a temper tantrum because the doctors and nurses could not give her a drink due to the tests they were running. She finally stopped me in the hallway and demanded that I get her a drink; when I told her that I was not allowed to, she began to scream at me. She told me that I would never be a good nurse because I did not care about people and I should give up on my dreams. Her words cut deep because I longed to help her, but the hospital rules restricted