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I t's strange to think that the injury that would cause Karen Roy intense chronic pain for the rest of her life happened in just a few seconds of work. In fact, her injury did not even hurt at all when it happened. It was October 1997. In the early hours of the morning, Roy, then a 32-year-old labor and delivery RN at Methodist Hospital of Sacramento, was helping a scrub tech and anesthesiologist transfer a 275 lb. woman who had just had a Caesarean from the OR bed onto a gurney. They had her on a sheet with a roll-a-board slipped underneath. Roy took the posi- tion at the patient's side, grabbed the sheet, and pulled. "I remember feeling my back just go," said Roy, as she smacked her hands together to demonstrate the suddenness with which her back failed. "I felt no pain. I felt like nothing, like my back had no support." Soon, she said, her back went rigid and stiff with no flexi- bility. She couldn't sit. Still, she thought she had just pulled a muscle and finished out her shift. After three days of rest, Roy started to experience violent muscle spasms in her buttocks and shooting pains down her right leg. And so began her seven-year struggle to quell her pain, to work as a nurse, to raise her kids, and to regain security for her family. Roy is determined to prevent similar tragedies for her coworkers. That's why this year she's supporting a CNA-spon- sored bill, SB 363, which would require all urban, general acute care hospitals to provide the necessary equipment and staff so that RNs and other healthcare workers will no longer have to man- ually lift and maneuver patients. The bill would also prohibit work- ers from being disciplined if they refuse to move a patient them- selves for fear of injury. Last year, a similar bill passed both houses of the Legislature, but was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The California Hospital Association and University of California system oppose this legislation. Kaiser Permanente, which is rolling out lift teams at its facilities, supports the bill. If SB 363 makes it into law, it would be the first legislation of its kind in the nation. Other countries, such as Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and Britain, already have similar laws. Roy says if a lift team had been available at Methodist, she would have used it. "C-sections are fairly predictable and we usu- ally know when we'll be done," she said. "I would have called them. If I had had a lift team, I wouldn't have been put in the same situation that gave me my initial injury, which left me open to subsequent injuries." Occupational health experts agree that the only way to slash the alarmingly high rate of back injuries among RNs and other healthcare workers is to use lifting equipment and trained personnel for the task. Good body dynam- ics aren't enough when you're moving a 475 lb. gastric bypass patient. The average nurse manually lifts 1.8 tons per shift, and research shows that when nurses lift a person manually, they risk a 75 percent chance of back injury, according to William Charney, a Seattle-based occupational health consultant, advocate, and expert on healthcare worker back injuries. According to 2003 Bureau of Labor Statistics data for nonfatal work injuries, 8.7 per- cent of hospital workers got hurt on the job, a rate exceeded only by people working in such fields as heavy manufacturing, the con- Feature | Story WatchYour Back 18 J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 C A L I F O R N I A N U R S E Like thousands of registered nurses, Karen Roy's life was thrown into turmoil after hurting her back at work. A lift team would have spared them a lot of needless pain. By Lucia Hwang