Honored VA Nurse Remembers 'Long Hot Summer'

Honored VA Nurse Remembers 'Long Hot Summer ’

BY NANCY DUNN

News Staff Reporter

The night of Aug. 15 was the beginning of a “long hot summer” at Ann Arbor's Veterans Administration Hospital, recalled Gloria J. Nunley, chief of the hospital's nursing service, this week.

She remembers it well. It was the night three suspicious respiratory arrests occurred almost simultaneously. An ongoing investigation of a mysterious upsurge in sudden breathing failures took a sharp sinister turn that night.

Nunley, a registered nurse with a 25-year career in VA hospitals, answered the telephone at home that night. “ ‘We need you,’ ” was the message. She arrived quickly and remained at the hospital throughout the night. Federal agents that night entered an investigation of a series of breathing failures thought by many to be caused by a member of the hospital staff.

From August through October, she said this week, "I cannot remember a day when 1 was not in the hospital." Several weeks ago, national VA hospital officials honored her for her “outstanding accomplishments during a recent period o£ crisis.”

In a citation presented at a gathering of nursing service chiefs from all 171 VA hospitals in the nation, she was praised in these words: “Her encouragement and leadership of her staff and her support of management contributed significantly to the uninterrupted delivery of high quality nursing care to patients. Her dedication and positive achievements under highly unusual "circumstances have earned her the respect and gratitude of the VA.” Nunley, who has held the top nursing service post for two years, was surprised to receive the citation.

Being available to employees to “share their anxieties and their concerns, to sustain them if you will,” she. said, is part of a leadership role, especially in crisis. She is proud of her young, mostly female staff: "They are young, they're articulate, they’re highly motivated and they’re intelligent,” she said. "They’re a joy to work with.”

The federal probe which began that fateful August night reached its peak in September, when agents swarmed through the hospital, interviewing’Virtually everyone on the staff. It was a difficult time for everyone, said Nunley, especially for the two nurses whose names appeared in news reports as alleged “prime suspects.”

Nunley said she has no idea what will result from the federal investigation and ah ongoing grand jury probe. But at the hospital, the "hanging in there together,

I call it” has brought the nursing staff together with a closeness not unlike that among soldiers, she said.

Of the speculation that the investigation is centered on one or more of the more than 100 registered nurses under her supervision, the 48-year-old Nunley said only: "I believe people are innocent until they are proven guilty.”

Every crisis situation is different, mused Nunley. She’s been through a couple of others: she remembers one night in Louisiana in 1969 when Hurricane Camille threatened. “Death was very imminent,” she remembers. “That Sunday night, I never expected to see daylight.” In California, a few years later, the VA hospital where she was nursing chief was evacuated because of fears that an earthquake could topple the building any moment. It didn’t.

“I still think the welfare of patients is our prime concern,” she said. “That’s what nursing is all about.”

Throughout the crisis, Nunley said, the hospital’s nursing staff did :an “exceedingly good job.” It was thatJvery quality of care, she said, which led to the unraveling of the mystery. The night of Aug. 15 was not the night “when the shade went up” on suspicious breathing failures, “and all was exposed”' she sqid. Studies were already underway, she said, to determine the cause of a strange upsurge in the number of respiratory arrests ov^ifa period of several weeks.

“People weren't sitting around wondering what's going to happen next," she said.

After Aug. 15, precautions were instituted by the hospital “primarily for the protection of the patients.” But those precautions, she said, provided opportunities for the nursing staff to pull together and minimize their anxieties as they cared for the patients.

Since intravenous tubes were the apparent method of administering a drug which brought about the breathing failures, all “IVs” were ordered given by a team of two nurses. That assured the patients, their families and the public that patient welfare would be safeguarded, Nunley said, but that doublestaffing also provided each nurse a built-in support. It was a way of building confidence, said Nunley, so everyone could perform despite the stress.

Although' awkward, the measure was "a reasonable step and was appropriate,” said Nunley, to assure public obedience in patient care at the hospital. One of several precautions taken after the events of Aug. 15, the double-staffing procedure “has pretty well served its purpose,” according to Nunley.

While federal agents go about what she calls the “mammoth task" of trying to come up with witnesses and evidence to unravel the last of the mystery, anxiety at the hospital is down to “reasonable levels,” she said.

Vigilance has become a “way of life” at the hospital, she said, and she thinks the dark days of 1975 have reinforced the nurses’ determination that careful patient observation is one of nursing's major responsibilities.

Nunley said she joined the VA nursing service, which she described as the largest in the nation, because of its potential for research and education aimed at better patient care. Her own staff has been doing an “exceedingly good job," she said, and she thinks VA hospitals have better nursing and doctors’ care than the public realizes.

She objects to stereotyping VA patients as indigents, or characterizing a VA hospital as an “old men’s home.”

At least 20 per cent of any VA hospital's patients are young men, she said. As for indigency, she contends there isn’t a health insurance policy in the nation that could offer anyone the kind of. care — from teen years to the 90s and beyond —offered in a VA hospital. VA patients aren’t indigent, she says, “they're the richest people on earth.”