Women in White

I Work only with extreme trauma and emergencies: gunshot wounds, knife wounds, car accidents, appendectomies. Mostly, it's street trauma—wounded people off the street. I worked through the big Miami riot late last year. The night it broke out, I hadn't been listening to the radio and I didn't know what was happening as I drove to work. About a block from the hospital, there was a police roadblock. They said they weren't letting anyone through because it was dangerous. I said, 'I've got to get to the hospital. They need me in the emergency room.' They let me go through. You don't want to know what it was like in the operating room that night."

That slice of reality is brought to you by Kathlyne Markham, a 26-year-old Florida nurse who, along with hundreds of others from around the country, contacted us when we publicized our intention to run a pictorial on nurses. And thanks to Kathlyne, her colleagues in nursing and in other allied professions whom you'll meet in this pictorial and many others who sent us their thoughts and feelings about their work, we received quite an education. First of all, we learned that these women are uniformly vocal in their demand for more respect and less stereotyping from both the general public and the medical profession. The second thing we learned was how little the general public understands how stressful and demanding nursing can be, even in the best-run hospitals. And the third thing: We were reminded that nurses are people, too. Away from their jobs, they are individuals as unique as they are similar when in uniform. They also happen to be, as a group, perhaps the most expressive, eloquent and sophisticated women we've ever had the good fortune to photograph. For that reason, we're going to let them tell you about their lives. Along the way, you'll probably relinquish a few misconceptions about nurses garnered from grade-B movies and soap operas. And you'll see beauty on every page. But let's let the women enlighten you.

The first thing they'd like you to know is that some things you see nurses do on television bear no resemblance to reality. Sonya Montgomery, a Miami R.N., worked in a coronary intensive-care unit for two years and had many opportunities to work with the defibrillator—the device used to shock a patient's heart back to its normal rhythm—and she says the television portrayals are usually overacted. "On TV, when the paddles carrying the voltage are placed on the patient's chest, the body gets thrown around as if it were in an earthquake. Actually," says Sonya, "even with maximum voltage, the body shows only the slightest movement, if any."

A more significant illusion, and a far more common one, is that nurses often get romantically involved with doctors or patients. Rhonda LeSuer, a Mississippi R.N., echoed the words of nearly every nurse we interviewed: "Most patients aren't in the hospital to love; they're in there to live. And the nurses have too much stress even to think about getting involved with a patient."

Susan Blake, a four-year R.N. currently working in a Louisiana hospital's general surgical unit, described how unromantic it usually is when a nurse does run (text concluded on page 224) Women In White (continued from page 88) into a former patient when she's off duty. "This guy introduced himself at my health club—I didn't remember him, but he remembered me—and we struck up a conversation. But right away, he started telling me how he had had a hard time going to the bathroom aften his surgery; he went into all the details. It really turned me off. When I'm off duty, I need to forget about nursing and relax."

As for the myth that most of them are hoping to marry doctors, nearly all those we interviewed scoffed. Natalie Mahaffey, a licensed practical nurse in Michigan, puts it this way: "Some nurses fantasize about marrying a doctor when they're just out of nursing school, but the fantasy rarely lasts more than a year. After you've called enough doctors at four in the morning or while they're on a vacation or while they're at a big family picnic and seen them drop everything to come to the hospital, you realize that those guys are more devoted to their patients than to their families. If you're hoping to marry a man who'll be home for dinner, who'll spend plenty of time with you and the children, you realize that a doctor isn't the best possibility."

And the last misconception the nurses we interviewed would like you to get rid of is the idea that most of them are, to use the words of Susie Owens, an Oklahoma City R.N.,"all ironclad white, submissive, silent, humorless and sexless. The classic question," she says, "when someone sees me away from work with my hair down is 'Are you really a nurse?' "

The best example of what we're supposed to think nurses should look like comes from Maria Baan, a New York R. N. who is also an actress (she has had roles in TV's CHiPs and the movie Nighthawks, among others). "I had been called by casting for a television show called Nurse, with Michael Learned and Robert Reed. I had originally been chosen to play a nurse, but when I got onto the set, the director stopped me and said, 'Whoa, wait a minute. I want a real nurse.' I said, 'I am a real nurse.' He said I didn't look like a nurse to him, so they gave me the part of a woman physician. That's happened to me twice. I've started looking at TV very closely to see exactly what a nurse 'should' look like. Most of the women cast aren't too attractive: plain, plump, middle-aged and rather custodial-looking." We have no doubt that this pictorial will debunk forever the myth that nurses aren't attractive.

So now that you know what nurses are not, they want you to know what they are. The first thing they are is under stress. If there was one theme that was repeated often in interviews and the letters we received from nurses across the country, it was that they were under more daily stress than most people could endure.

Margareta Jackson, a licensed vocational nurse in Texas, speaks for most of her peers when she says, "The nursing field has suffered and will continue to suffer a tremendous rate of attrition until the pay and the working conditions of nurses compensate for the stress we have to endure." Part of the problem, says Jackson, is the tension that exists between nurses and doctors. "In many hospitals," she explains, "the relationships between doctors and nurses haven't changed in 50 years. There is no sense of family, of team."

Or, as Markham puts it bluntly, "A lot of doctors treat nurses like peons. But," she adds, "some of that is beginning to change, mainly because women won't put up with it anymore."

The other stress factor is built into the work itself. Sometimes it can be terrifying, as Bree Jesser, a California L.V.N., discovered: "Once, during my first week on the job at a new mental-health center, I was assigned to guard several patients while they went outside for exercise. I was teamed with another nurse, but she left to go to the washroom, and while she was gone, a female patient attacked me. She came at me with a flying karate kick, knocked me down and then started beating on my head. Fortunately, another patient ran into the hospital and told a nurse's aide that I was in trouble. He came to my rescue. But I had headaches and was very depressed for weeks after that."

And sometimes the stress comes from the constant struggle to confront death bravely. Nikki Nickerson, a Florida R.N., says, "The most upsetting part of my job is when a patient dies on the operating table. It's best to cry and not be ashamed to share your sadness with the other nurses and doctors. That helps you keep going."

We could go on, but we think by now you've gotten the point. These are strong and thoughtful women. That they're beautiful is almost secondary once you get to know them. But the fact is that they are. And they don't mind your knowing it.

"We work hard and rarely get much recognition," says Montgomery. "I don't think this pictorial will hurt the nurse's image as long as you let us tell our point of view. If you do, I think it could be a nice tribute to us. And you know what? We deserve it."

Sonya, we couldn't agree more.

"When I got onto the set, the director stopped me and said, 'Whoa, I want a real nurse.' "