Susan Lambert’s most memorable patient planned to jump in front of a train, but changed his mind at the last minute. Instead, he lied down on the track and waited for the engine to hit him. When he arrived in Lambert’s emergency room, he was alive, though not in one piece.
Lambert, a registered nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, showed how the man had positioned himself, parallel to the track with his arms out to the sides. When the train came, it cleared his body but not his arms. “Here we had to take care of this poor kid,” she said, “who not only was depressed and alive, but was alive and had no arms. That was probably one of the worst things to happen while I’ve been here.”
Another patient cut off his male anatomy and threw it out a window. “He did it, on purpose, because the ‘voices’ told him to,” she said, bewildered. “Then he got scared from all the bleeding.” The hospital sent police to find the organ, but surgeons were not able to reattach it.
Lambert, a woman with weathered skin and smiling eyes, wearing flowered scrubs and faintly sparkling earrings, said she liked the intensity of trauma. “I know it’s kind of weird, but it is interesting,” she said. “Patients come in, you assess them, make sure they’re ok, and then they go to the next floor and you get new ones. People tend to get sick real fast, they bleed quick, they break a lot of bones. Most of them get better.”
She once expected to study business, she said, but changed her mind after volunteering at a nursing home during senior year of high school. She attended Northeastern University and completed several co-ops at MGH, where she was hired after graduation. After spending time in orthopedics, the ICU, and other departments, she landed on surgical trauma floor White 7, where she now acts as an advisor to other nurses.
Working several twelve-hour shifts a week, starting at 7 a.m., she delegates tasks, assigns new patients, organizes discharges, and makes sure nurses get their work done. She checks on patients, changes their wound dressings, and travels with them to tests on other floors.
“Susan’s a caregiver, and she’s a phenomenal nurse,” said colleague Amanda Lutz. “I couldn’t think of anyone better to be in the leadership role. She’s supportive and she advocates for other nurses if there are problems. If a nurse is drowning with an assignment that’s too heavy, Susan will run to the rescue.”
Lambert finds herself frustrated with how her profession is portrayed on television. “The relationship between doctors and nurses is such that one couldn’t exist without the other, and we’ve worked years to get it that way,” she said. “Then you watch a show, and the nurses are depicted as subservient and stupid.” Some patients expect she will simply rub their backs and soak their feet, she said, tasks she is happy to perform if she has time but which are certainly not her priority.
Though she thinks programs like “Grey’s Anatomy” exaggerate many elements of hospital life, she does run into quite a few odd situations each week. “I’m just amazed with the things [doctors] find in people’s bums,” she said, including an intact jar of Pond’s cold cream. “Patients say, ‘I don’t know how that happened’…They aren’t all that forward about what they did until something becomes life threatening.”
The nurse also sees many drinking-related accidents, which make her worry about her children, Sam and Clara, a high school senior and freshman, respectively. "The drinking and driving makes me absolutely insane," she said. "Clara drives away and I think about all the head injuries. I go home and tell her everything, but I've been here so many years now that she just goes, 'That's nice, mom, I'll never do that. I'd never speed.' Right."
Taking a breather from her long shift, Lambert sat down in the break room, a simple space the nurses had made their own. Magnets and photos decorated gray lockers, and flyers littered several bulletin boards. One wall featured a poster about wound care, while another contained order forms for White 7 t-shirts.
On the third board, employees had tacked news items about the hospital. One stood out.
“These girls dressed in pink for me, for my four-year cancer-free day,” said Lambert of her floormates, pointing to the photo that accompanied one article. This year, she said, they’ll dress up for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “We’ll have everything – pink lemonade, pink cupcakes…. Did I mention that we love to eat?”
Her time as a cancer patient made her understand her own charges better. “I saw what patients go through, having gone through chemo,” she said. “It was definitely beneficial for me as a nurse… I’m far more patient, far more tolerant of their moods, especially when they’re diagnosed.”
“Susan was probably a horrible patient,” said Betsy Potter, a friend and Arlington, Mass. neighbor, with a laugh. “She’d never want to sit and do nothing. She walks miles every day.” Despite this, she said, Lambert knew she needed to follow the doctors’ orders, to do everything correctly, so she could tell people today she’s a survivor.
“Without her I would not be as involved in the schools or the town,” said Potter, also a mother of two, of Lambert, who serves on the Abington school committee. “She means well, does well, and looks out for herself, her kids, and all the other kids in town. Susan has the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met.”
As Lambert ran into other nurses throughout her break, she asked about how they were handling their patients and workload.
“Should we send someone home?” one asked.
“I’d like to, but I don’t think we can. You know, we’ve had [an ICU nurse] over here for a while already…”
Her tired coworker agreed.
“I’ll get coffee,” Lambert said.
Later, she asked another nurse about a particularly sad case, of a young mother who came down with necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-eating bacteria. The disease had spread when the woman went into labor, Lambert explained, cutting off circulation to her extremities. Doctors had to amputate both arms and both legs.
If the botched suicide attempter’s case was distressing, this was heart-breaking. “She’s got a three-month-old,” Lambert said, concern filling her eyes. “Isn’t that sad?”
As much as she loves her job, she's thankful she gets to leave it behind at the end of the day. "I walk out of here some days and think, I'm so glad to be home in little Arlington," she said. They think they have problems there, but I drive in and say, I'm so lucky to be here in my car. I've got all my limbs, well, minus a breast, but what can you do, it's not the most important thing."
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