Nurses, Interns and a pot-pourie of patients.

I was admitted in a hospital, for the first time in my life, a few weeks back due to an infection of the lungs promptly after the Doc saw the xray. I really didn't have an idea what to expect except just an 'imprisonment' for a week or so! Being an avid reader, I called up my local bookseller and ordered a few books to keep me company.

I was admitted during the late evening so the first night went off quite uneventful with a nurse doing her regulars with a thermometer and a BP machine and then 'tubing' me up with a drip bottle suspended from a stand and administering me a 'night rest' tablet which promptly 'rested' me off for the entire night. It were the following days and nights that I was exposed to one of the most wondrous people on earth: Nurses and Interns.

Being a speaker and educationist, especially on Leadership, I have a natural tendency to observe deeply almost anyone and anything around me that could possibly stand out as an example of exemplary leadership. And here, in the premises of a hospital I could observe so much that Nurses and Interns are continuously exposed to on a moment to moment basis and their amazing reactions! And I very specially refer to the Nurses and Interns simply because their exposure to their surroundings are more continuous in nature than that of a Doctor. Also, they are much younger and less experienced with minds that are far more absorbent of the affects of their surroundings than the matured Doctors.

Over the the week I noticed that within a hospital can only exist a chaos of emotions emanating from relatives, friends and acquaintances of a host of patients that enter and leave its portals - alive or dead, quite literally speaking. It is so difficult for the average human being who may have never frequented a hospital to imagine that there is always a steady flow of patients being admitted and not all of them in a condition you could bear to see. Grotesquely butchered people - probably the result of a street fight, profusely bleeding patients - an aftermath of an accident, pregnant women screaming and wrenching, patients suffering from heart attacks, strokes, ruptured veins and bleeding uncontrollably and whatever have you!

And midst all this are the nurses and interns. Deftly handling patients after the Doctor has done with them. Soothing their emotions. Building up strength in each one of them to face their physical adversities. Helping them to bear the pain of an amputated limb. Holding their hands and counselling them even after a child was still born. Offering their shoulders to parents who had lost their son in an accident. Hugging children who had just lost their mother. Pandering to rude an demanding patients with a smile of assurance.

And the list of observations that I made seemed absolutely endless!

Often, while I lay in my hospital bed at night I would wonder, how do these marvelous young professionals handle the everyday stress of life beyond their work? At home? On the streets? With some of their 'not so warm' relatives, neighbors or whoever? How do they think sanely with the influence of their daily work exposures embedded in their 'sub-conscious' minds? What kind of a human being would they be beyond and outside the exit of their place of work?

I spent much time speaking to each one of them and realized that they, unitedly, harbored so much of a desire to naturally protect and recreate each patient's life into a blissful existence...once again!

Very truly...an amazing display of self-actualized leadership!!!