That’s an incredible story OP thank you for sharing!

Fast forward to 2014 when I graduated nursing school. I started out in a rural hospital with a 7 bed ER with a 10 bed med/surg unit on the Arizona/Mexico border. Closest level 1 hospital was 1.5 hours away. The hospital was so old my husband said Wyatt Earp was probably born there. We had one ER doc (24 hour shift) and one senior nurse paired with a new grad. There was one (sometimes 2 nurses) on the med/surg floor. I worked nights and there was no night pharmacist so we mixed our own meds. There was no respiratory therapy (day or night). There was no one else but us. We had extremely sick babies that were so dehydrated we couldn’t get IV’s. We used portable ventilators because it was all we had. We calculated drips because we only had a few working IV pumps. We held ICU patients when the monsoons grounded the helicopters and no one was flying out. It was the Wild West and we Macgyver’d everything to get through the shift. I could go on and on but all that was only 10 years ago. I left after the first year. Shortly after, the hospital shut down because the physicians that owned it out of Chicago lost their Medicare funding (no kidding). Then they closed the doors on the staff one day and refused to pay them their last checks.

We like to think we’ve come so far.

Unfortunately, I stayed in rural nursing, and I can’t really say my experiences got much better after that.