Meeting Nightingale in Alabama; Where Were the Young Nurses? Further Notes from the Disaster Zone

Sue Hassmiller has been blogging from the tornado-damaged area in Alabama, where she’s volunteering for the Red Cross. This and all other posts in this series are collected on a separate page for easy reference.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

Finishing up some very difficult hospital visits with victims and family members at the University of Alabama–Birmingham Medical Center today, I saw the sign for the school of nursing. I remembered Dean Dodi Harper telling me last year of a man who had donated to her school what might be the largest grouping of original Florence Nightingale letters. A priceless gift indeed! Her intent was to transcribe the letters and eventually have an exhibit. As I saw the School of Nursing sign, the conversation all came back to me . . . and then I realized it was May 12, Nightingale’s actual birthday, the day we celebrate Nurses Day! Too good to be true: I e-mailed the dean and got an immediate response (I love those type A personalities!). She was away, but the assistant dean for clinical affairs and partnerships, Cindy Selleck, would welcome me—and indeed on this occasion the letters were on display in a temporary exhibit. Having been on a special Nightingale tour last year to England and Istanbul/Scutari, the words of this great mentor had taken on a whole new meaning for me (here’s the blog series I wrote at the time). 

Seeing this very special exhibit and Nightingale’s words on her very […]

2016-11-21T13:13:15-05:00May 13th, 2011|Nursing, Public health|1 Comment
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Pay It Forward: A Meditation on Suffering, Volunteer Work, and Storytelling

Sue Hassmiller has been blogging from the tornado-damaged area in Alabama, where she’s volunteering for the Red Cross. This and all other posts in this series are collected on a separate page for easy reference.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

What an honor and privilege it is to help another human being—that’s how we all feel being here. There is no greater gift. Period. And we love to share our stories—including those that break our heart, especially those that break our heart. That’s what we do: we do our work and then we share our stories—our therapy, if you will. And we’re like kids at Christmas with what we are able to do for people, comparing the gifts we were able to give and reactions to those gifts. 

Today, because of the gift of money from Red Cross donors, I was able to take an inconsolable 21-year-old, who was swept up into the sky holding onto her baby for dear life, whose hard landing back to the ground caused six broken ribs,  a torn knee, a black eye, and a broken collarbone—and now pneumonia—and provide her with a doctor’s visit, filled prescriptions, food, and gas money to get to her doctor’s appointments and pick up her baby (who is doing well) from her boyfriend’s house many miles away. These are all the things we take for granted, but for her, on this day, luxuries.  […]

2016-11-21T13:13:15-05:00May 12th, 2011|Nursing|2 Comments
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‘Today I Cried’: A Family’s Loyalty, A Veteran’s Lost K-9 Helper

Sue Hassmiller has been blogging from the tornado-damaged area in Alabama, where she’s volunteering for the Red Cross. This and all other posts in this series are being collected on a separate page for easy reference.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

Today I cried.

Although I’ve seen horrific things and heard the worst stories imaginable here in Alabama, it was not until today that I cried. It had to do with my soft spot for daughters and dogs. 

The daughter. My morning visit was to a 50-year-old woman, Kate (not her real name), in the most rural of rural Alabama. Our team went to see her because she had lost not one family member, but three: her mother, her sister, and her brother. Kate told us that her mother and sister wouldn’t leave her wheelchair-bound, 6’ 4” brother for shelter. They didn’t have the strength to move him, so they simply sat with him in the living room and prayed for the best. She later found them in the field, with her sister still holding her brother in her arms.  […]

2016-11-21T13:13:16-05:00May 11th, 2011|Nursing|3 Comments
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Unheeded Warnings, Last Words, the Value of a Bathtub: More Notes from Alabama

Sue Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, has been blogging from the tornado-damaged area in Alabama. This post elucidates some of the philosophic and strategic context for the emotionally challenging Red Cross volunteer work she’s currently involved in. This and all previous posts in this series are being collected on a separate page for easy reference.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

Human Caring
It amazes me how much compassion there really is in the world. You don’t always see it day to day, but during disasters it’s the definitive order of the day. It is so refreshing to be a volunteer in this temporary health care structure we are working in and not have to worry about 10-minute office visits or rushing in and out of patients’ rooms trying to get it all done before the bell rings for the day. The Red Cross simply (with guidelines, of course) directs us to attend to all human needs (ok, yes, we do have forms to fill out). Therefore, a visit to a distraught family could take 10 minutes, 10 hours, or 10 months.

The devastation is so great here that as long as there are people to volunteer and the financial resources to carry on, this job will go on for years. A few of the groups that are here besides the Red Cross […]

2016-11-21T13:13:16-05:00May 10th, 2011|Nursing|1 Comment
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Dispatch #3 from the Alabama Tornado Zone: A Tight-Knit Community, the Red Cross ‘CSI’ Unit, Public Health Nursing

Sue Hassmiller, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, has been blogging from the area in Alabama recently devastated by tornadoes, where she’s volunteering with the Red Cross. This and all previous posts in this series are being collected on a separate page for easy reference.—JM, senior editor/blog editor

Hackleburg Is Gone!
Picture yourself in your present surroundings; take a look around at the buildings, the houses—and now try to picture them completely gone, with you standing right in the middle of it. That is what Hackleburg went through on April 27. Ninety percent of the small town is gone. You can tell that people lived there by the personal items strewn about, but you can hardly tell where the houses once stood. They have all been flattened. This is very different from the aftermath of the flood following Hurricane Katrina, when the flood-soaked houses were pretty much left standing.

Standing there in the middle of the rubble with family members, it’s hard for me to imagine how anyone survived this. But they did . . . at least most of them. This is a close-knit, church-going town, and […]

2016-11-21T13:13:16-05:00May 9th, 2011|nursing perspective|1 Comment
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