At the time I'm writing this email, my mother has been in the hospital for almost two weeks, and in that time we have met many, many extraordinary nurses here at Albany Medical Center. We are truly lucky to have such compassionate, expert care. Even among this cohort of excellent nurses, however, one has truly stood out: Nina Haelen.
My family arrived at the Albany Medical Center ER in fear. In the preceding two weeks my mother had wasted away to skin and bones, and the day before we arrived, she had suddenly stopped talking in full sentences, she refused to eat or drink, her gut had swelled to the point where she looked pregnant, and she couldn't keep her eyes open. Unable to reach our local doctors, we called her consulting physicians in New York City. They feared the worst: they suspected an aggressive advancement of her pancreatic cancer; my mother, as far as we could tell, was near death. To have any chance of figuring out what was wrong, we needed two procedures quickly: first, we needed to drain the fluid building in her abdomen; second, we needed an MRI. However, even though the situation seemed extreme, the doctors told us they were unable to schedule either procedure-- as days passed, my mother's procedures kept being pushed off to the following day. Her doctors kept telling us that it would be easier for us to schedule the procedure outpatient because emergent cases bump pending ones. Yet at this point discharge was unthinkable: my mother lay in bed barely awake, unable to eat, barely talking. We paced corridors in tense anticipation.
This is where Nina enters the picture. Seeing how dire things had become, and sensitive to how scared we were, Nina got on the phone and pushed the hospital to schedule the procedures. Because of Nina, both were done within 24 hours. We were floored, and we asked her how she managed to do it. "I'm a bulldog," she said; "I got them to squeeze her in," shrugging as if this were simply her job.
I suspect that, strictly speaking, this was not "simply her job," and that she worked extraordinarily hard on our behalf. Nina not only cares for her patients, but she also advocates for them. When our doctors were nowhere to be found (no oncologist had seen my mother in a month when we entered the hospital, even though she had been admitted twice), when the surgeons had given up hope (one presumptuous surgeon told us my mother's symptoms pointed to a terminal progression of the cancer, and that the only option left was hospice), Nina stepped in and took charge. And it completely changed the course of treatment. The MRI showed that, in fact, no tumors had developed, and that whatever my mother was experiencing was likely unrelated to the cancer. Seeing this, the doctors quickly scheduled a surgery and my mother is on the road to recovery. This would probably not have happened if Nina hadn't pushed for the MRI.
Nina's charge was to care for her patient, but she also took care of us, the family, making sure we were okay during this ordeal. In other words, Nina has the precise skills of a top-flight nurse, but she also has those extra, ineffable qualities that make somebody, not simply competent, but peerless. Although Nina had a busy floor (especially right after the holidays), she always made it seem like she had all the time in the world for us-- a trick I'm still trying to figure out, how she was able to provide such intensive care to so many patients at once. And even though she has moved on to other patients, she still stops in to check on my mother. In the past two weeks, she comforted us as often as she checked in on my mother; she would talk to my mother about the future, about travel plans, about the news, even when my mother could barely respond. It would be hard to overemphasize how important Nina's optimism was to my mother and to our family. The overall signal to all of us was that we should keep hope alive, that this was not the end, that we were in good hands.