Being an LVN Nurse Means Being a Hero
Date: March 11, 2019
Here they are, the next graduating class of future licensed vocational nurses!
What will their practice bring to them and their families, to their patients and coworkers? We have trained these future licensed vocational nurses on a healthcare professional’s science of medicine and practices. We have raised them to be sensitive to others’ needs and to be caring and compassionate people.
Not only that, but we have coached them to be excellent and understanding listeners and to be effective teachers. Yes, teachers. We don’t usually think of healthcare professionals as educators, but they are.
Instructing and training patients and their families on adjusting their lives to their new health conditions is a big part of being a nurse in modern days. An LVN nurse must teach a newly diagnosed diabetic self-injection with insulin and follow a strict diet and medication schedule.
An LVN nurse must educate a dialysis patient on carefully following the appropriate diet and attending procedures. An LVN nurse must train a caregiver or a family member of a post-stroke geriatric patient to give them at-home tube feeding and take care of that gastrostomy. Nurses are educators too.
Education is a part of the compassionate nature of this profession. However, treating the sick and the helpless as more than a medical chart, but rather as a unique person, who has loved ones, a history of the past, and plans for the future, makes a genuinely great LVN nurse.
Being a nurse is more than administering injections on time, passing out meal trays, and giving nursing reports. A great nurse will give a hug to the mother of a dying child to provide her with emotional and spiritual support when she needs it the most.
A great nurse will take a moment to hear an older man’s story about his beloved wife, who passed away last year, whom he misses so much. A great nurse will embrace a sick child who loses his mother while at a Children’s Hospital’s pediatric care unit.
Yes, being a nurse is so much more, and this is why these students chose an LVN program as their plan for their future, taking charge of their lives and helping others’ lives. So, here they are, the graduating LVN class of 2010. They may not know it yet, but they are so much more to those who will need them.
To listen with compassion, sympathize with their suffering, and hold their hand during the physical pain and emotional agony of those patients, these nurses are teachers, mothers, friends, and heroes!
