Angels Beside Us

We will all have tragic times in our lives. Working as a critical care or cardiac Nurse since 1986 has brought an incredible array of patients, stories, and lives across my path that taught me many lessons on how to deal with these tragic times we all face. Many of these patients have touched me in ways that I was completely unaware of until I was given the gift of working at the bedside with some of the most amazing people I have ever met. With time comes that dawning realization that when you actually save someone’s life, you truly are friends for life. The lesson repeatedly given was that it was not what happened to you in your life, but how you reacted to that event. A dawning change in my perspective as life becomes an opportunity to positively change my patients and my own future every day of our lives from that point on. When I am mentally challenged by an event of some sort, my reaction is to write about it in a one page vignette that allows me to physically place what I have faced behind me. These are my “teaching moments” to myself and now I give them to you. My first book, “Signs of Life Observations of Death” published in 1994 was how I responded as a new nurse to the joys and sorrows of working with the variety of patients that medical/surgical involving fresh post surgical open heart patients in the critical care arena which was reviewed well in the Chicago Tribune. A collection of observational stories with my own lessons learned the hard way put down on paper to remind myself what the experience had taught me. My new book, “Angels Beside Us” is a collection of stories from my own personal pathway to enlightenment as a Nurse. Since 2000 I have worked on a cardiac step down unit involving recovering post open heart patients and returning these heart patients to their lives prior to the hospital. Special people and events that have changed my entire perspective on the world and how I and everyone I touch react and participate to the life I am trying to create. Lessons on how a simple touch can change a life if you allow yourself to actually be within the moment and seek to interact with your patients. These stories are meant to inspire and allow you to change your perspective on what your life can be if you look at it a little differently. How what you do on a daily basis impacts not only those around you but the lives that those people touch as well. Many of these stories are from patients that were at the lowest point of their lives; some are from those that had actually returned from the vague land of being on the wrong end of a “code blue” after a cardiac or respiratory arrest. Stories of success and a chance to return to the life once lived outside the hospital once again. An acute awareness of just how special our time here is and what an incredible gift it is to be able to get up every day and be self sufficient. This is written for those who have been touched or are being touched by illness within your life. When death impacted my life the most, all that I had taught others to believe through the years was forgotten, just as we all will. These are my stories of how I learned to live again though lessons taught to the Nurse by those in his care. These pages are what I offer to you and I hope that you will find what you seek within them, my personal journal of the lives that have touched me the most deeply through the years. I hope you find the writing as inspirational as I did experiencing it.