Every day that I work at Redlands Community Hospital, I feel privileged to work with such wonderful people in every department. However, something happened so special that I needed to write this letter to make sure everyone knows how wonderful it really is. I was finishing up a week in the intensive care unit when we received an admission over the weekend that was very sick. This patient required dialysis to the point that if she did not get it she would almost certainly die. We made the request for hemodialysis at about 6 o'clock in the evening. The response unfortunately was that there were no nurses on call for hemodialysis and the earliest they could get one would be the next morning.

Of course, this was not acceptable and we had to potentially transfer the patient out for hemodialysis. Of course, this was not going to happen soon enough and the patient was already fairly unstable. So I called as many people as I could that I knew could help me. My first call was to my director Dr. N. He told me to call V, our director. If anyone can get things done it would be V. It is worthwhile to note here that sometimes when I get into difficulties it is always good to call somebody who knows about resources that you may not have. In this case, it was true. I talked to V and updated her on the information. V jumped into action and called Katarina, a nurse on 3200.

Katarina works for us at the hospital but also works for the dialysis company. She volunteered to go in at 3 o'clock in the morning so that she could start dialysis on our patient. Currently, the patient is still sick but is getting life-saving therapy. I cannot find the words to describe how it feels when you know that there are other people on the team that care about our patients as much as we do.

Just the other day I was talking to a patient in observation. She told me that she was very impressed with the care here because she could overhear the nurses talking in what she heard was that nurses were asking for help from other nurses and the other nurses were helping out and they were thanking them for this. This patient was seeing camaraderie and teamwork in action and whenever that's witnessed, patients know that they're in good hands. I really want to point out the work of Katrina and V for coming together for this patient. However, it is not just this patient. I see this sort of cooperation every day on 3100 and around the hospital where I am privileged to work. Thank you, team! Again I'm just so proud to work for such an amazing bunch of people. Even though were not on the stage or on the silver screen where people can see it, what we're doing really matters. Thank you so much!