National Nurses United

Nurse Essay_1 10/5/10 2:38 PM Page 24 For RN DeAnn McEwen, it's compassion and respect for human dignity, integrity, social justice and equality. Nurses' Values W By DeAnn McEwen, RN hy am i a nurse? My widowed grandmother was most influential in my decision to become a nurse. I looked up to her, respected her, and spent a great deal of time with her. I treasure her memory and I miss her to this day. Grandma Goodman was an elementary school teacher. She went to Fresno Normal School to receive her college education at a time when most women did not pursue higher education. Her family was poor and she worked her way through doing odd jobs such as tutoring, mending, cooking, and cleaning. My mother was the eldest of her four daughters, who each dropped out of high school in the 1950s to begin their families. They were "so done" with school. I know she was disappointed that none of her daughters chose to continue their education. She was widowed when her youngest daughter was 4 and my mother was 12. My grandfather was her one and only true love and she never remarried or even considered the possibility. She had to temporarily place the girls in a boarding school while she resumed her teaching career and until she saved enough money to establish a new home for them. I grew up knowing that I was loved and that she had high expectations for me. I knew from an early age that I wanted to go to college in Fresno, as she had done, and to become a teacher, like her. Her classroom was my playground after class, and it was filled with books, art supplies, an incubator with a year-round supply of chicken eggs and hatchlings and an occasional rabbit, tortoise, and a hapless lizard or two. During her summers off, she supplemented her income by working as a caregiver and "practical nurse." She eventually moved from the San Joaquin Valley to Southern California after she retired from teaching, and she began taking part-time and full-time jobs as a live-in caregiver for elderly widows, widowers, and special-needs adults to supplement her retirement income. She charmed me with stories about her "old people." She was patient, had a great sense of humor, yet was very matter of fact and down to earth about the frailties of the human condition. Above all she 24 N AT I O N A L N U R S E was compassionate and affirming; she treated everyone with respect and preserved their dignity when her patients felt they had occasion to be embarrassed when their memories or bodies began to fail them. I met many of them and helped her when I could during the many summer vacations that I spent with her. Her last residence was a small home she purchased so she could be near her older sister in La Verne. It was across the street from a nursing home, so the summer before I went to college, she helped me get a job there as a nurse's aide so I could earn money for school to supplement my scholarships and loans. At that time there were no formal programs for training to be a nurse's aide; it was on the job. The residents needed frequent bathing, cleaning up, changing, and feeding. There were so few of us. I loved my patients and felt appreciated just for doing the simplest of things for them. The nursing home took both elderly residents and "overflow" patients from Patton State Hospital, who were mostly disabled young adults who couldn't be cared for at home. Most of these patients were socially isolated and had no regular visitors, friends, or family members! The staff became the family for many and we were their only contact with the outside world. We sat with them when they were dying. I was very shy and socially awkward as a young teen. I enjoyed the patients' easy conversations, their summative stories, and the lessons they'd learned about life. I think their existence and humanity was validated by sharing their stories and memories. By passing something on to the future generation, by helping someone, it affirmed their existence. That quality about people still means a lot to me and it's what keeps me engaged in nursing. I loved helping them back and I knew at some level, even then, that that was all any of us had to give that would be of lasting value. At the time, my grandmother began preparing me to face her death. She was sensitive to my feelings, yet direct and matter of fact. I didn't know it then, but little more than a year later (after I'd completed my first year of college at Fresno State with a declared major of English and a minor in Spanish to prepare me as an ESL teacher), she was found dead in her home. My whole world turned upside down. W W W. N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G SEPTEMBER 2010

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