Chloe Kirkland: Personal Experiences and Professionalism
In the summer of 2025, I got a phone call letting me know that my uncle had passed away. He had been in the hospital for a while due to complications of congestive heart failure. They had intubated him because of his difficulty breathing that was coming from the amount of fluid that his body was holding onto. Once my uncle was intubated, he began to get better. My family celebrated every small improvement because we thought it meant that we were one tiny step closer to being able to have him come home to us. Unfortunately, every baby step that he improved was followed closely by a few steps back. The ventilator had to be turned back up until they saw no improvement at all. This is when my aunt decided to have the ventilator turned off, and we had to face a reality that none of us were ready for: we had lost my uncle.
Throughout the course of the same summer, I completed a nursing externship at Newberry Hospital. I had the opportunity to work in the Emergency Department as well as the Labor and Delivery floor. While I thoroughly enjoyed working in both departments because I was able to learn and experience a lot, I found myself falling in love with the Emergency Department. Initially I was nervous about working there due to the fact that I was unsure what I was going to run into as well as the fast-paced environment. I found myself quickly learning that the fast-paced environment was exactly what I wanted.
One particular day in the Emergency Department, exactly a week after my uncle had died, we were quite busy. That morning, we saw some mental health patients, patients with common colds, and some falls. It had started off just like a typical day. I was sitting at my desk when I heard the emergency services team call in that they were on the way to our hospital with a patient that was having a difficult time breathing. Before this day, I had seen many other patients come in with shortness of breath and a history of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). This was nothing out of the ordinary for the Emergency Department. I continued going in and out of my assigned rooms when this particular patient arrived at the hospital.
I watched as they wheeled him into Room 3. He was pale, gasping for breath. Overall, he just looked really, really sickly. Throughout the course of my externship, this particular patient looked the sickest of everyone that I had seen. I was sitting at my desk when I noticed a lot of nurses and doctors running in and out of this man’s room. Brittany, the nurse that I was working under, told me that they were about to start the intubation process because they couldn’t get this man’s breathing under control. She was asking me if I wanted to step into the room and watch the process of the intubation happen. Did I want to? Absolutely not. I was filled with the emotions of my past experience the week prior with the death of my uncle, and I didn’t want to see someone else go through the same thing that my family had just gone through. But this was a unique opportunity for me to learn something from a medical standpoint, so I knew that I had to go into the room and watch, despite my emotions.
I walked into Room 3, and the charge nurse, Kimberly, ushered me in behind the curtain with the rest of the hospital staff. They had about three nurses, two physician assistants, and three members of the respiratory staff packed into this small room. The crash cart was open and ready to go, and there were a lot of tubes everywhere. The man was laying in the bed, stripped of his clothes, oxygen mask attached to his nose. He was still fighting to breathe, and he was panicking because of it. It broke my heart to see him like that. He was surrounded by people that he didn’t know, waiting on his wife to arrive, going through one of the most challenging moments anyone can face. Regardless of what I was feeling, I knew that I had to put my emotions aside and continue to take this opportunity to learn.
I watched as the team worked quickly and efficiently to sedate the patient so they could work to help him breathe. They were constantly checking his vitals and doing every step of the process correctly and ethically. Everything that they were doing inspired me professionally. I knew that I wanted to be just as good as a nurse as them in the future.
While I knew going into this externship that there would be moments that tugged at my emotions and empathy, I wasn’t quite prepared for a connection that felt so personal to me. In this moment I knew that I needed to put my emotions aside and act in a professional manner. Regardless of what is going on in my personal life, even if it is overlapping with work, I learned how to sit my emotions aside and focus on the situation and the patient in front of me on this particular day. This was the first time that I had ever been put in a position where I had to learn how to make a separation between my personal life or personal emotions and my professional persona.
Chloe Kirkland is a junior nursing major from Chapin, South Carolina, and is expected to graduate in December of 2027. She completed a nursing externship in the Labor/Delivery Unit as well as the Emergency Department at Newberry Hospital over the summer of 2025. After graduation Chloe wants to work as an Emergency Room Nurse.