Transplant Nurses
Continuing our merry dance through the various specialties of nurses we come to transplant nurses. If you become a transplant nurse you’ll be dealing with both those who are waiting for a transplant and those who have received one: there’s more to it than just the actual operation, there needs to be continual monitoring to check for possible organ rejection. There is also, in those few situations when there is a live transplant donor (as with some kidneys), the care needed for them as well.
The education and training is as it is for other registered nurses: either a full college degree, a two year college degree or a Diploma, followed by taking the license exam (and passing it, naturally).
Where this becomes interesting I think is in what sort of results from our EQSQ personality tests would best suit those in this field. It can be extraordinarily rewarding, this form of medicine, for the effect that a transplant can have on someone is near miraculous. Someone getting a new heart, for example, would have been at death’s door, quite unable to do anything other than lie in bed: within a day or two of the operation they are encouraged to use exercise bicycles: a stunning change.
On the other hand, most people who need transplants do not actually get them: there’s a terrible shortage of organs suitable to be used. Quite what effect that would have, knowing that many of your patients will die and that some will be saved, purely by random chance (it depends upon the tissue types of those who die in accidents), well, I just don’t know here.
What do you think?
July 24th, 2007 at 2:37 am
There is more to the transplant story than whether or not the needed organ was found. At least 10-15% of transplant patients experience transplant rejection. This is a vast improvement from the 70-80% it was in the 1960s, but still something to contend with.
Transplant rejection has to do with the body’s natural immune defenses that try to boot out foreign substances from the body. And we can’t exactly tell the body to stop doing its work, that this is a nice foreign substance, not a bad one, the way you might tell your 3-year-old that the old neighbor lady is actually a nice ‘stranger,’ not one likely to steal him and keep him forever from his loving family.
Nonetheless, working in this field, you have to be prepared for this kind of relapse. Imagine the disappointment in finding that rare organ, successfully cutting open and landing it in its place, only to find out it doesn’t quite work in its place?
Patience needed here, lots of patience dealing with very confused patients.
July 24th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
It’s truly a gift, a talent, to be able to help people during crises. One woman who worked as a transplant coordinator (a job closely related to transplant nurse?) writes on her blog about feeling called to the profession. She also writes about aspects of the job you wouldn’t necessarily imagine—like the fact that she has to approach people with dying family members and ask them if they’d be interested in having the person’s organs donated—and that many people then see her as a vulture. Tough but very meaningful work.
July 25th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
It’s truly a gift, a talent, to be able to help people during crises. One woman who worked as a transplant coordinator (a job closely related to transplant nurse?) writes on her blog about feeling called to the profession. She also writes about aspects of the job you wouldn’t necessarily imagine—like the fact that she has to approach people with dying family members and ask them if they’d be interested in having the person’s organs donated—and that many people then see her as a vulture. Tough but very meaningful work.
August 4th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Lucy, I wasn’t aware of that intelligence on rejections: that they exist, yes, of course, but not that they were that high. In fact, that’s an astonishingly high rate: does that intelligence include those that are rejected years later? Or only those rejected almost immediately? The immuno- supressive drugs have got a lot better in recent years, which is what makes me think that’s the long term rate. Tissue typing has also improved a great deal making me think that the short-term rates would now be very low.
Millie, yes, I agree, that must be a very hard part of the job indeed: it’s exactly one of the things that makes the whole area of transplants such an emotional minefield: except in the rare (but increasing) cases of live kidney donations, someone has to die so that someone else can live.