About Marcy Phipps, BSN, RN, CCRN, CFRN

Chief flight nurse at an international air ambulance service.

Not Compatible With Nursing

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” was published in the May (2012) issue of AJN.

photo 1-1 Photo by the author

“His family knows this is not a survivable injury, right?”

This question, posed to me in the doorway of my patient’s room by a trauma surgeon I regard as brilliant, caught me off guard.

“No,” I said. “They don’t know that.”

He frowned at me, mumbled something about false hopes, then moved away to continue his rounds.

This wasn’t the only physician who’d expressed a strong opinion regarding my patient’s mortality—a consultant had deemed his injuries “not compatible with life.” But I’d been caring for this man, as a 1:1 assignment because of his high acuity, for every shift for weeks. It seemed obvious to me that my patient’s continued presence in the ICU—and his relative stability on that particular day—directly opposed the dire predictions. The man’s family did not see his situation as hopeless, and neither did I.

And yet days after the surgeon uttered those words, my patient suffered a complication and became so unstable that for hours he teetered between life and death. The resuscitation effort was massive—and no one mentioned survivability. No one behaved like there was even a shred of futility in […]

2016-11-21T13:05:28-05:00February 5th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|5 Comments
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Taking Flight: A Nurse Recharges Her Batteries

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay “The Love Song of Frank” was published in the May (2012) issue of AJN.

interior, BK 117 medical helicopter interior, BK 117 medical helicopter

You’re part of a fixed-wing flight transport team called to pick up a 32-year-old male who’s been involved in a paragliding accident in Puerto Rico. Upon landing, you see an ambulance at the end of the tarmac. As you exit your plane, the ambulance pulls up and the crew opens the back door of the rig. They pull the patient out on a stretcher and hand you a folder of X-rays, saying, “He’s all yours.”

After four days of intensive training in the Air Medical Crew Core Curriculum course, my team was given that scenario as a group assignment on the last day of class. We were given a folder of radiology films and briefed on our patient’s vital signs and our assessment findings. We conducted a quick “field interpretation” of his X-rays and presented our interventions, along with our concerns and specific accommodations for transporting this unstable patient to Florida in a Learjet.

This was no ordinary class. Offered to nurses and […]

2016-11-21T13:06:38-05:00September 9th, 2013|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Something Like Grace

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay “The Love Song of Frank” was published in the May (2012) issue of AJN.

ViewFromPlaneWindowMark was in town to be the best man in an old friend’s wedding—on a vacation, of sorts—when the unthinkable happened and he was involved in a horrendous traffic accident. He was ejected from his rental car. His injuries were severe and life threatening.

Mark’s family was halfway across the country. Getting to Mark quickly seemed impossible. But this is where the story takes a turn:

Mark’s family found a flight leaving that morning from their local airport, with the exact number of available seats that they needed. As they bought the tickets, they explained the nature of their emergency. They got to the airport in the nick of time. While checking in, they were approached by an airline employee who asked if they’d already arranged a rental car. They told him that they hadn’t—they hadn’t even stopped to get their clothes.

They didn’t know it at the time, but the employee who’d approached them was the pilot of the plane. He’d learned of the family emergency and held the plane for them. He knew how serious Mark’s accident had been, as he’d happened to drive right past the accident scene on his way to the airport before the first leg of the flight.

When the plane landed, the pilot requested that Mark’s family […]

2016-11-21T13:06:57-05:00July 22nd, 2013|nursing perspective, Patients|4 Comments
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Get the Job Done

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay “The Love Song of Frank” was published in the May (2012) issue of AJN.

Dietetics class for nurses, 1918/Cornell University Library/via Flickr Nursing students, 1918/Cornell University Library/via Flickr

I remember being a new nurse and having an order to place a Foley catheter in a female patient.

I was filled with dread. Urinary catheter placement was the only skill I’d failed in nursing school (I’d contaminated my sterile field), and placing a catheter in this patient was sure to be a challenge, as she was obese and unable to cooperate. It was not a one-person job, even for a far more experienced nurse.

When I asked a coworker for help, she sighed and said, “I don’t have time. This isn’t nursing school, you know. You just do the best you can and get the job done.” […]

2016-11-29T13:33:01-05:00July 8th, 2013|nursing perspective, nursing stories|3 Comments
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On Its Own Terms: An ICU Nurse Considers Human Adaptability

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular writer for this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” was published in the May (2012) issue of AJN. Some of the patient’s identifying details in this post have been changed to protect privacy.

by ashraful kadir/ flickr by ashraful kadir/ flickr

I caught an airing of The Shawshank Redemption the other day. It’s one of my favorite movies—full of irony and rich with messages of hope and perseverance.

There’s one line from the movie, in particular, that I love:

“Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

It’s one of my favorite movie quotes, and one that plagued me at work recently as I took care of a woman who’d suffered such a high-level fracture to her cervical spine that her injury was compared to an internal decapitation.

Her doctors had talked with her and her family at length about her injuries and prognosis, and although she’d initially indicated that she wanted to withdraw aggressive care, as time passed her directives became inconsistent—she’d tell her husband one thing, her medical team something else. On the day I was her nurse, she looked at me and very clearly mouthed the words “I don’t want to die,” then shut her eyes tight, ending our brief conversation as effectively as if she’d stood and left the room.

I think that most of the time, at least in the ICU where I work, people aren’t “getting […]

2016-11-21T13:07:26-05:00May 30th, 2013|Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|3 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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