Back in the late sixties and early seventies, most women who were bold enough to think about having a career became nurses or teachers. Both professions were noble ones and certainly ones that would impact lives. It is often hard to measure exactly how many lives were really touched. Just for grins, I started to do the math. If a nurse began her career 30 years ago and worked full-time for those thirty years she essentially worked about 62,400 hours, give or take about a couple thousand. That is about 8000 days. Taking care of an average of 30 patients a day that is about 234,000 patients. That means that nurse interacted with patients by starting IV's, putting on dressings, bringing warm blankets, and providing teaching and reassurance to approximately 234,000 people. To many people that could have even meant, calming a frantic pre-operative patient, saving someone' life by initiating CPR, or halting a post-operative complication by recognizing a potential problem.

Recently, I attended a retirement party for a nurse I had worked with throughout the late seventies and eighties. I learned a great deal from this nurse and often thought about her when I made decisions about my own career. She was always content to just be by the bedside taking care of patients in the way she knew best. She began her career when nurses looked like nurses and wore caps and white uniforms and her mission was simply to assist the doctor in taking care of people. Some of that hasn't changed. While health care has changed dramatically over the last 30 years, her role in helping people remained the same. Many people reading this article would probably recognize whom that nurse would be. They may even have referred to her as "my nurse". She had that appeal to people she cared for. She always took ownership for her actions and people were comforted by her warm, gentle demeanor. Even as a Nurse manager, she accepted the challenges of her role in the changing environment of healthcare in the late eighties. Nurses that worked under her direction learned from her. I know I did.

Last month, the nation celebrated Nurse's week. This article is a tribute to her and nurses like her. The staff and the patients she cared for knew her as "Tippy". She often reminded us to remember why we became nurses and to always act in the best interest of the patient. She embraced her job as her profession and taught me to do the same. I was privileged to have worked along side of her.

So you see, it is not just the 234,000 plus some patients that benefited from her care and understanding it was a multitude of her peers, subordinates, nursing students, and yes even doctors that benefited as well.