I used to work with a surly charge nurse who loved to put his hands on his hips and joke, "Are you crying? There's no crying in nursing!," in imitation of Tom Hanks's character in the film
A League of Their Own, some of which was filmed in Evansville, Indiana, where I was living and working as a trauma nurse in 2005.
I'd been a nurse for five years and a nurse aide for two years before that, and much of my tenure had been spent traveling, working on contract—the nursing equivalent of a scab. Temp agencies dropped me as if by parachute into hostile, perpetually understaffed, and virtually lawless emergency rooms. Administrators overpaid me in the short term so they could, in the long term, underpay, underinsure, and understaff their nursing departments.
All of this is to say that on early Sunday morning, November 6—the day an F3 tornado tore the toe off southwestern Indiana, decimating a mobile-home park, killing 25 people, and injuring more than 200 others—I wasn't as seasoned and cynical as my charge nurse, but I wasn't green, either, and I knew better than to cry.
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