Retired Marine thrives in second career as emergency nurse

[thedrifter]

Retired Marine thrives in second career as emergency nurse
By MELISSA SCOTT SINCLAIR, The Virginian-Pilot
© October 21, 2003

AT 6 FEET 4 INCHES, David Weber looms over most of the scurrying nurses and doctors in the bustling emergency room at Chesapeake General Hospital. He is imposing, even in his turquoise scrubs and scuffed white sneakers. Yet in the midst of chaos, as he strides from one curtained examination room to another, Weber smiles.

“Why are you smiling?” people sometimes ask.

“Life is good,” he replies. “Nobody’s shooting at you. Life is good.” Weber, 58, is a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who chose a most unusual second career — emergency room nurse and nurse trainer at Chesapeake General.

Eight years ago, Weber traded his silver oak leaf insignia for the simple tag “David, RN — Clinical Coordinator.” He still moves in a military rhythm and speaks in short, staccato sentences. His gray-threaded hair remains close-cut. But Weber is more a kindly teacher than a drill sergeant, his colleagues say.

Be forthright with patients, Weber tells his nurses. He instructs them to explain to patients what medications do before administering them. And he never tells children a shot won’t hurt a bit.

“It’s going to hurt,” Weber says. “I’m going to prick you with a needle. You can scream. You can holler. Just don’t move.” Children appreciate honesty, he said. And when they’re feeling better, “they love you.”

“People are people,” Weber says, whether scared, sick, screaming or serene. Nurse trainee Siobhan Hubel remembers many a night of frustration with recalcitrant patients. But when Weber walks in, she says, something changes. “They melt.” Weber rarely reveals his military edge, in fact.

“The only time I find myself barking orders is when people are misbehaving.” Weber steps in when someone who’s upset or disturbed starts causing trouble. He always intended to work in medicine but took a 25-year detour.

Weber graduated from a college pre-med program in August 1967 — a few months too late to go to medical school that fall. He worked at a hospital until the day his boss, who sat on the draft board, said, “David, I have some bad news.” Weber didn’t want to join the Army. Instead, he became a Marine. It was exciting to a young man of 22, Weber said — and grinning, belted out “Hooo-aaaah!” in the emergency room.

Even as an infantryman in the crucible of Vietnam, Weber decided he liked his job. “So I stayed for 25 years.”

His travels included time in Guam, the Far East, Turkey, England and Italy.

When it came time to retire, Weber wasn’t ready to rest.

He considered going back to where he’d left off and getting a medical degree, but that would have taken eight years. “I’d be a real old man now,” he says. So soon after the end of his military career, Weber began nursing school. “A nurse?” asked his old buddies from the Corps.

Weber adapted easily to his new profession, becoming one of 43 male nurses in the hospital out of a total nursing staff of 783. From the start, he knew he wanted to work in the fast-paced emergency room.

On a recent Tuesday night, the ER was jammed, with a patient to attend to in every room. Monitoring machines sounded a chorus of chimes and reverberating beeps. “It’s a zoo here,” Weber said, surveying the room.

But Weber, almost five months into training with his two newest nurses, doesn’t run as much as he did before. His key credo is, “Watch one, do one, teach one.” For difficult but common procedures, such as inserting an IV needle, it’s important for the teacher not to take over for an unsure trainee, he said, but to “let them fail.”

Close supervision is only necessary when they’re performing a tricky procedure, like a nitroglycerine drip. But he’s always available, just in case. “He remembers what it’s like to be a new nurse,” said Hubel, a recent nursing school graduate.

When Weber first arrived at Chesapeake General, Hubel was working as an ER secretary. Curious about nursing, she would pepper him with questions. Now that Hubel is only weeks away from completing her training as an ER nurse, Weber won’t hand her the answers anymore. “He will push you,” she said.

When Hubel asks, “What does this mean?” he replies, “You tell me.”

The extended training is an investment, Weber said. When the hospital devotes time and money to making sure its ER nurses are confident and experienced, he said, those nurses will stay. Chesapeake General enjoys an unusually low nurse vacancy rate of 2 percent, said Pamela Pascual Mills, public relations coordinator for the hospital.

For all his easy way with both nurses and patients, Weber only reluctantly divulges details of his own life. Only by chance do you learn he worked as a Marine undercover operative for five years doing “secret spook stuff.”

Weber also works 24 shifts per year with the Chesapeake Police Department, assisting with everything from baseball games to hurricane emergency services. And he was the first man in the nation to be trained as a sexual assault nurse examiner, according to hospital officials.

Weber was interested in forensics, he said, and felt he could perform the delicate and difficult task of gathering evidence from frightened victims.

“There were objections,” Weber said. But he proved himself. With a female nurse or police officer at his side, he would talk young women through the intimate procedure of collecting DNA samples. Does anything unnerve David Weber? “I’ve seen a lot of death and stuff,” he said.

It comes with the job. But when a child’s life ends in the ER, Weber said, he feels shaken.

“Most times, the death of a child is unnecessary,” he said.

If only someone had been watching. If the car had slowed down. If the door had been locked.

“That’s hard sometimes, but you go on. There are patients waiting to be seen.”

Reach Melissa Scott Sinclair at 222-5208 or e-mail melissa.sinclair@pilotonline.com

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories...264&ran=111480


Sempers,

Roger

[michleboost123]

I am really impressed with Marine. I think it is a good decision. I also know some more retired person which are including these types of activities.
cna training
Phlebotomy Training
Phlebotomy certification

[Tennessee Top]

Well...we know he didn't say "Hooo-aaaah".

[Sgt Leprechaun]

An EIGHT year old thread...brought back to life via your friendly neighborhood lice infestation.....

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