Rogers said, when she got home, “My phone was going crazy. The
hospital was calling because we were all hands. United Flight 232 was coming in for a crash landing. Sioux City Airport is a very small regional airport. It was a large, very large airplane. There were 296 people on board.” “It was absolute chaos going on at the hospital. Out of those 296
people, there were 185 survivors. You can imagine what our ER and our intensive care units looked like.” With no equipment in the ICU, Rogers said “Pharmacy and stock
rooms are coming up with literally crates full of IV solutions and equipment that we’re tearing through to be able to save people’s lives.” “After the smoke settled, as much as it could, I went to a friend's
house in Sioux City to get a couple hours of sleep and then came back the next morning. Again, my patient was [the same man]. That morning, I was the first person to speak to his wife. She did not know that he was alive yet. I was the first person to speak to her to confirm that, yes, he indeed was still alive. I took care of [him] that night.” Despite her round-the-clock effort, not more than 48 hours or so
after the plane crash, Rogers said she was called into the office at the hospital to be written up for the first time ever. “And at the moment that it happened, I thought, this is really unfair,” she said. “And the reason I got written up was [my patient] the next morning
had some blood in his ear and some dried blood on his nose that I failed to take care of properly.”
Standards Are High Even though the community applauded the work of the hospital during the plane crash crisis, the fact that the facility she worked in was the top hospital in a rural, tri-state area made expectations very high for all who worked there. “Now, a lot of people have come to me when I’ve told that story and said how unfair that you were treated that way. But we were also a group of nurses that said we are the best of the best. This is not how we care for people. This was not the expectation,” Rogers said. “How would I want it to be if it was me? I try to personalize it by making really hard decisions, having hard conversations with people. And when I have to have these types of conversations with my staff, how would I want that information to be delivered if it was me?” “Is that the kind of care that we want our residents to receive? And
of course, the answer is no.” The lesson learned from being admonished for her performance
even when dealing with a crisis left an impression. “As a young nurse, it really helped me set the course on the type
of nurse I wanted to be — and the expectation I have for our teams as well. They’re not going through a tragedy such as the plane crash, not physical trauma, but they’re certainly going through a trauma in making really hard decisions on what their end-of-life care is going to be,” Rogers said. “And we really need to be aware of that. We must be better advo- cates. We must expect better of our profession.”
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“How would I want it to be if it was me? I try to personalize it by making really hard decisions, having hard conversations with people. And when I have to have these types of conversations with my staff, how would I want that information to be delivered if it was me?”
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