They inspire me, every single day - Inspiration Monday guest post

*Special note: Do you remember Jewels from Naughty nothings and Jewels turning 30? She has left Blogger due to personal reasons but she has a new blog up at WordPress: http://accordingtojewels.com/. You all are welcome to follow her new blog; just click ADD at the bottom of your blogroll then click “Add from URL” and paste her URL into the screen and then click “follow”.*

I owe you all a big apology… This post should have been published last Monday but I somehow forgot about it. Don’t know how this has happened. Shame on me… I am sorry and will do my best not to do the same mistake again. 

This month’s inspiration is Rebecca who writes a lovely blog Making Memories. She’s a lovely lady who works as a nurse and she LOVES her job.

I feel I shouldn’t stall anymore since this should be up a week ago… I give you Rebecca:

When Starlight asked if I could write a post about what inspires me I jumped at the chance. The only struggle was that lots of things, places and people inspire me every day. But what really inspires me? I had no clue and that's why it has taken me a while to write a post to her. Until now I had just hoped something "would happen" to inspire me.

In my job I work with post-operative patients and on the whole they are generally quite healthy, have easy recoveries and go home. We have unwell patients but with a lot of help, support, medications and advice we get them back to a stable condition. Then we have patients that deteriorate on us out of the blue. Totally unexpected and put us in panic mode. I'll never forget a couple of weeks back we had one of those patients. She had had a major operation, was recovering quite well despite having a palliative cancer. This patient's surgery was performed to prolong her life to gain more quality with her family and to make her more pain free.

All of a sudden she started haemorrhaging. She was bleeding out of her nose, buttock, mouth and blood was pouring into her two drain sites. It may sound gruesome, but that's because it was. She was 'crashing' and we had to save her stat. Her heart was giving out, she was unconscious, she was limp and going blue. She showed no signs this was going to happen as in most cases we get warning signals. She was having her breakfast chatting away one minute and literally a minute later totally unresponsive. We had doctors, nurses and specialists pumping her chest, bagging oxygen, injecting adrenaline, pushing pints and pints of blood through her veins and still nothing. Her blood loss was increasing and the look on the medical team faces said it all. We were losing her and after nearly an hour were slowly giving up. In fact one doctor said "she was palliative anyway" which was making me will her to do anything to stay with us. She could not be gone. I know, as a nurse, that most cardiac arrests are unsuccessful but I just had a feeling she could do it. She did not go through this operation to get more time with her family for nothing. 

She had to survive.

Then exactly 59 minutes after she crashed her blood pressure began to rise, her heart rate was increasing and the bleeding was lessening. I can honestly say I have only ever seen this in medical programmes, not before my own eyes. She was moved to an intensive care ward and when I visited her yesterday (a week on from the emergency) she was sat up having breakfast and chatting away like nothing had happened. 

But it had. She nearly died and medical teams were nearly at the end of their tether. We were nearly going to give up on her but she hadn't given up on herself just yet.

You see this is what inspires me, not stories like this. But people like her. People who bring themselves back from the brink and defy the odds. People who refuse for people to give up on them. Who fight. Who will themselves on to prove to others that they can make it despite what is thrown in their faces. 

People who sing to an audience for the first even though they're really scared. People who come out as a different orientation despite the backlash. People who fight for their country because they're selfless. People who bring themselves back from the brink of death because they want to see their family one more time.

They inspire me, every single day.