The Nurse Who Gloved Me

A person on the Facebook fan page posted this comment that inspired me to write about the view from an LPN’s perspective.

“I’m an LPN and all I ever hear is RN this and that, LPNs are just as good and as important. But we don’t get enough credit for being a nurse. It’s only if there is an RN after their name.”


I am an adaptive enigma.

I became an RN in the second half of my life after spending many years as a Vocational Nurse. I was comfortable in my life and was very experienced in the ICU, cardiac step-down, med-surg, oncology, medical psychiatry, orthopedic and HIV care.

I was familiar with the work and my critical thinking was comparable to most Registered Nurses, but my frailty was the math, and by that, I mean basic math. I could pass medications with ease, as I could do any problem in my head, but the written exam was more difficult than any Swan-Ganz catheterization I’d ever assisted. I could quote Shakespeare and Kierkegaard, study the analysis of Jung and Freud, but the analytics of simple arithmetic was as elusive as connecting a VCR in the early 80’s. The fear of math became as oppressive as many of the Nursing Managers I had encountered in my career.

Here's my personal root cause...

I initially became an LPN because of an extremely difficult existence. The life of nursing chose me, I did not choose it. My mother left the family because of a pregnancy unknown to my father. She began a life of welfare, street-walking and pill popping. She worked nights for “under the table” pocket money at a sleazy and dangerous nightclub in the red light district of Honolulu. I left the foster home in which I was placed to become the baby sitter of her last child. I had two shirts and one pair of pants when I moved in with her and walked three miles every morning to finish high school.

I could have handled my responsibilities without any problem except for the abuse I endured from my mother’s mental illness and her very large and savage boyfriend who became our tormentor for many years. I wore long sleeves even in the hot sunshine to cover the bruises.

I became an LPN to escape my circumstances and to this day I believe becoming a nurse saved my life. I never studied in school preferring to smoke marijuana before and after class. To this day I wonder how I passed the exams and, more importantly, the state board. There is a powerful innate guardian that gave me the strength and courage that it took to change my first adult diaper, and the patience to walk an old person to the bathroom.

My first inclination that the nursing world was bigger than me was when I gave 2 tabs of Tylenol with codeine to a young mother with a mastectomy. I gave them to her without any water and left them on her bedside, causing her to reach over her painful incision. She turned on her light and I found her crying. When she told me what had happened I hung my head in shame. I was so young and self-absorbed in my own drama that I could not see the big picture that my life was taking.

I had dancing talents induced by Grand Marnier, so how did this happen? This life of IV fluids, Foley insertions, bowing down to doctors and nurses with degrees was a harder than I had anticipated. The view from an LPN’s world is an oppressive one filled with difficult patient care assignments and a monster on your back: The monster of knowing that you could do better with a little more education.

One day in San Francisco I was banned from attending an important meeting for Registered Nurses. My friend Mary Grace Sanchez, an LPN co-worker, snuck into the meeting and raised her hand and said, “LPNs work hard too.” The answer from the manager was, “If you want to complain about it, I suggest you go to school.” Mary was then escorted out of the meeting.

“That's it!” I said in disbelief. Going to school had crossed my mind for decades and it took a selfish, inconsiderate Nurse Manager to put me on the right path. She became the nurse who gloved me. That very day I enrolled in the basic math course at the city college and Mary Sanchez applied for the PA program at Stanford University. (She’s now making 6 figures.)

The writing on the wall was always there for me but I didn’t want to read it.

I walked in the darkness from the BART station to the City College of San Francisco to my first math class and I was surprised to see many other LPNs and aides in after-work scrubs doing the same thing I was, simply trying to “Move on up.” The walk I took always reminded me of the three miles it took to get to high school, only this time the bruises were internal.

The life of an LPN is not an easy one and the only way to get ahead is to reach out for higher education. I think of my first patient and her mastectomy. She had to reach out and feel the pain from her recent incision to get what she needed the most…relief.

For the nursing students and LPNs who are reading this, find your personal moment of epiphany and let that moment glove you.