One of the vignettes from yesterday was that after several really excellent nurses tried a blood draw and couldn't nick the rolling veins for a mcuh-needed test, they called in the big guns.

Now, from the advance chat about it, I expected an ego of the first order to stride in. No.... in floated this very elderly, frail lady in a brightly printed smock over her whites, with a little kit over her arm. A different kit from the ones the others had carried.

It was a very small, crowded treatment cubicle, but a path to the bedside opened up as if by magic. She quietly and unassumingly got to work, taking a low seat in the chair which manifested by the bedside where my friend's arm still lay dangling from the last attempt. While he told us all how badly the others had done, and how this try wouldn't work either, she relaxedly slipped in an almost-invisible needle smaller than a mosquito's sucker. With no fanfare at all, she let a couple of bottles fill up via the tiny tube attached to the needle.

My friend wondered when she'd start "trying," because he hadn't even felt her deft aim reach its target.

The surrounding nurses had clustered in as close as they could, to watch and learn, without any fuss from their side either. But you could tell that even though this lady was so unobtrusive and deferential, she was a Real Big Cheese around there. I think she must have been a pediatric nurse, used to the tiniest veins; everything in her kit except her custom tourniquet were tiny, and she had tiny models of that as well.

In relpy to the astounded family members' stunned question, "How did you do that?", she just murmured, "Well, I've been doing this for over 40 years, so I guess I've just had a little practice."

What was notable about this to me was not only her skill, but the way she was happy and totally unhurried, coming into the ER to do the ER folks a favor, and never letting on that it was a favor. And the way everyone present just had so much quiet respect and love for her, without a word of it being uttered. The rapt attention the somewhatyounger nurses paid, even though they clearly were experienced professionals as well-- to soak up as much from this ancient lady as they could, while they could.

I like to think this nurse just floats through the community doing that, everywhere it's needed-- I am sure that's a fantasy, but it was such a privilege to watch her at the top of her game. She was made back when they made REAL NURSES.

~Susan