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Trapped in a Blizzard With a Dying Patient: Flight Nurse Claire Barnett's Survival Story

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Flight nurse Claire Barnett joins host Jana Price on Nurse Converse to share one of the most intense survival stories in flight nursing.

Claire is a quadruple board-certified emergency nurse and the chief flight nurse for an international medevac company. About a year and a half ago, she and her trainee partner accepted a flight to pick up a young man with possible hantavirus. The plan was solid. The weather looked manageable. Then everything changed.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, the storm closed in behind them. The pilot was forced to land in the middle of nowhere as a blizzard rolled over them. With a critically ill patient, limited oxygen, no cell service, and search and rescue unable to reach them, Claire had to make decisions that went against every protocol she had been trained on — including giving Ativan to slow her patient's breathing and save what little oxygen they had left.

This episode is about more than survival. It's about what flight nurses face every shift, the weight of being someone's only hope, and the six Navajo search and rescue heroes who spent five hours building a road to reach them. Claire also shares the advice every new nurse needs to hear: don't lose your voice.

Jump Ahead: 

  • 00:38 — Welcome and introducing Claire Barnett
  • 01:45 — From concrete dispatcher to nurse: the story that started it all
  • 04:27 — Why flight nursing was always the dream
  • 06:01 — The setup: a young patient with possible hantavirus
  • 09:00 — Weighing the storm and the patient's oxygen needs
  • 11:30 — At the bedside: hypoxic, tachypneic, alert and oriented
  • 13:00 — Lift-off and the storm closing in
  • 14:30 — Landing in a whiteout in the middle of nowhere
  • 17:00 — The oxygen problem and an out-of-protocol decision
  • 20:19 — The RAM cannula and the BiPAP workaround
  • 22:00 — Giving Ativan to slow the patient's breathing
  • 24:21 — The helicopter confessional
  • 26:00 — The call to prepare for the worst
  • 27:30 — Headlights in the storm: the Navajo rescue team
  • 29:00 — Wrapping the patient and sliding down the mountain
  • 30:30 — Claire's first intubation in the back of an ambulance
  • 32:30 — What it feels like knowing every flight could be your last
  • 36:07 — Claire's advice to new nurses: don't lose your voice
  • 37:30 — The nurse who became a nurse because of Claire
  • 38:44 — Closing thanks

Listen now at nurse.org/nurseconverse.


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SPEAKER_01

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SPEAKER_02

Hey guys, it's Nurse Jana and welcome back to an episode of Nurse Converse with Nurse.org. I am incredibly excited today to have uh Claire Barnett on. I met Claire at a BCEN conference. It's a Board of Certification for Emergency Nurses in Destin, Florida. And uh weirdly, we had been outside petting some puppies that they brought in for all the conference goers and kind of met Claire. And then next thing I know, Claire's up on the stage speaking, and does she have an amazing story to tell? So uh Claire Barnett is a quadruple board-certified emergency nurse in emergency nursing, trauma nursing, pediatric emergency nursing, and flight nursing. And she comes with a wealth of knowledge and experience, but a story that you guys are never ever gonna forget. So um, Claire, let's get into it. Uh, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what kind of nursing you're doing right now, and how you got here. And then we're gonna we're gonna go into this awesome, amazing story that you have to tell.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks, Jenna. Uh, you make me sound way better than I am, first of all. Um, I'm just a just a regular plain old nurse. Um, so I currently work for a long-distance international um flight medevac company. I'm the chief flight nurse. We do transports within the US and also we go outside, um, mostly up and down the Western Hemisphere, Japan, New Zealand, Hawaii, um, repatriating people back into the country after they get um hurt or sick on vacation. So that's my current job. Um, how did I get here? Uh I so I grew up in England and moved here when I was 17. Uh, got a cool met a met a cool guy, got a cool job. Uh I was a concrete dispatcher. Uh, and my number one driver, this is a long story, I'm gonna make it short. My number one driver, um, he was about a year away from retirement. He got really sick, he got a uh rare disease that they gave him six months to live. And this gentleman had worked his whole life as this concrete driver. Um, and it devastated me as a dispatcher that he wasn't gonna enjoy his retirement. And so I was very naive. This is like 20 years ago. Uh, I got on the phone with a bunch of hospitals. Somehow I got hold of somebody at Sloan Kettering, which I didn't even know what that was at the time. And they told me about some experimental trials they were doing for this particular disease, but they weren't doing them on the West Coast yet. So um I got I got really angry about it and and was like, that's not right. They ended up opening up an experimental trial up in Seattle that I was able to get him into. And he went through a stem trial, stem cell transplant, got really sick, but ended up coming through it and lived for another 10 years. Long story short. Um, I got to thinking that if I could do that with no experience, think of what I could do with actual training. And so that started my journey to nursing. And that's how I ended up being a nurse. Um, spent seven years in a critical access hospital, seven years in a level two trauma center, always wanted to fly. From the time that I took my first um trauma patient that got flown out of the critical access hospital, and the flight nurse came in and put his hand on my shoulder and said, Good job, we got it from here. I was hero worship. That is what I want to do. I want to be that person that goes into the room, makes everything better. Everybody loves it. Uh, everybody loves me. I can do whatever. So um, yeah, basically flew part-time for the company that I now work for, spent two and a half years working on a helicopter, and then I end up going back to the company that I worked for before as chief flight nurse full-time. So that's how I got her.

SPEAKER_02

I I'm laughing because you're like, I'm just a plane on nurse, but the story that you tell before you even became a nurse is incredible. The fact that you weren't even a nurse and you went out and you helped somebody like that, that's just I you really are an inspiration. So which makes this story that you're about to tell just mean even so much more. Because I didn't know that part from the conference, and now I just have so much more, even more respect for you now. So um, guys, at the conference, it was if if you've never been to a BCEN conference, you do not have to be certified to go. It was fantastic. But some of the stories that came out of there were just I walked away feeling um so proud to be a nurse with these stories and just honored uh that these are people that call themselves nurses, and I get to call myself a nurse as well. And um, when Claire got up to tell her story, uh there was you couldn't hear a pin drop. It was incredible. And there were with a lot that's going on, Claire, with flight nursing, it's really important that we talk about this because there are dangers in nursing, period. We all know what's going on in nursing right now. Um, violence and short staffing. There's just nursing is um, for lack of a better word, it's become a very dangerous profession to save lives. Very, very dangerous. And the things that we do to save lives have now put our lives in danger. And you found yourself in that same spot. So uh take us to take us to the story. Tell us how it started out, uh, when it was, and and let's go from there. All right.

SPEAKER_00

So about a year and a half ago, uh I was flying out of uh one of the Southwest states um out of a very remote area. Uh I'd been on the helicopter for about a year. So I was I still felt new, but I was proficient enough to be able to train another person. So the size helicopters that we flew down there, you could only fit two clinicians in the back. So um usually when you start flying, you put three clinicians together, two experienced and one inexperienced. So you have a good solid crew with somebody to learn. But in the helicopter, it's a little bit different. You can only fit two people in there. So I had a trainee who was very proficient in um flight clinician care. She had flown on a fixed wing, but not on a helicopter. So it was just herself and I. It was her second hitch. So um, new to the job, new to the helicopter, but proficient in medical care. So wonderful partner. Um, we had done a perfectly uneventful flight, taken some pictures, everything was great. We flew back to base. Um, it was February, so middle of the winter, but in the southwest, clear blue skies, everything looked great. So got back to the base, grabbed something to eat, we get dispatched for a flight. Um, when as a as a flight clinician, when you get dispatched for a flight, you're not told anything about the patient. You have to accept or deny the flight based on unbiased information. So, you know, if you find out you're transporting a three-month-old baby that will die if you don't, of course you're going to take risks. So they don't tell you that information. They only tell you where you're going, um, and that's it. They where you have to pick up the patient and where you have to drop them off. So you talk to your pilot, talk to your partner together, come up with a decision on whether this is a safe flight to take. We looked at the weather, and there was um there was a storm system coming in. And according to the weather reports, um, we looked at all of them. We had about two to four hours before it hit us. And according to the flight that we take in, it would take about 30 minutes to get to go pick up the patient, an hour to take them to where they would go, and an hour to get back to base. So the chances were we wouldn't make it back to base, but we could still take the patient where they needed to go. Uh, we agreed that this was an acceptable thing to do. Um, when a storm comes in, we fly patients off of a very remote area. Um, they have no resources there. Um, and when storms come in, that's when people die because they can't, they have limited resources. Their hospitals or clinics get overwhelmed. And so we did feel a little bit of pressure. We should go get this patient because a storm is coming in, and that's when things get rough. We don't need to get back to base. We can hotel wherever we're going. Um, we just need to get this patient to a higher level of care. So we agree to take this flight. We also have some contingency plans. If we get up in the air and things look bad, we come back home and we land and we call it. So we did have backup plans. So we felt that everything, all the decisions we were making were the right ones. Um, so then we find out about the patient. This is a young man in his mid-30s. He has possible hontavirus. If you don't know what hantavirus is, it's um quite prolific out where we were flying. Um, it is a disease that progresses very quickly. You get it from mouse droppings, it's respiratory, you get pulmonary edema, real difficult to ventilate. I've flown a couple of hantavirus patients before, and they're they're some of the sickest patients you'll get. You just can't ventilate them. Sometimes you have to take them off of the ventilator and bag them, just be able to ventilate them. Um so we know this guy was sick. Um, so we pack all our equipment, calculate our oxygen. So this gentleman's on high flow. We don't have high flow um capability at that time in the helicopter. So we looked at our options. We could put them on BIPAP, but that's not always the safest because BIPAP in flight, if you have any kind of a leak coming out of the mask, it can run through your oxygen and then you'll run out of oxygen in the air, which is the worst thing you ever want to have happen. Um, we could intubate them. Um, we did talk about that. That was a possibility. We could intubate them for the flight. Um, I'll talk a bit more about that when we get to the facility. Um, or we could just put them on a non-rebreather. And a lot of times people do really well that are on high flow on a non-rebreather for short periods of time. So we felt that we could go to the bedside and figure this out. Um, so we lift off and we head to the facility. As we're landing at the facility, we can actually see the leading edge of the storm. Uh in it doesn't look like it's moving very fast, but but we we were able to see it. So as we were landed, we talked to our pilot and um agreed that our pilot would wait outside with a helicopter. And if it started getting too close, then we would we would either stay there or we would head out. Fortunately, that the storm is coming in from an opposite direction from what we had to go. So it could get quite close and we could still safely take off in the direction that we were going. So felt pretty comfortable with the plan, thought that was good. So got to the bedside. Um, the patient is very, very tachypnik, uh, breathing between 40 and 50 times a minute. He's severely hypoxic. Uh, when we switched him over to our equipment, he actually desatted into the 70s pretty quickly. So um, yeah, we decided, um, and he was alert and oriented, so I couldn't justify intubating him. Um, we put him on a non-rebreather and he tolerated that well. So we decided that that was the right route to go. We have enough oxygen for, I think we calculated two to two and a half hours on that non-rebreather. Plenty of time for the one hour flight. Good to go. We're all happy. Load the patient up, take him out to the helicopter. And when we got out to the helicopter, that storm's pretty close. Like I was like, ooh, that's pretty close. So talk to the pilot, and I was like, hey, bro, we good? And he's like, Yes. He said, We're going in the opposite direction. If we can package him up, like get him inside the helicopter pretty quickly, we're we're good to go. This pilot has been a pilot in that area for five years. And I actually to this day, I do still implicitly trust him with his decision making. Um, and so uh talked to my partner a little bit. Of course, my poor partner, who's you know, it's our second hitch, she's like, Oh, yeah, I'm good. Yeah, that's great. Uh load the load the patient up and off we go. Bless her heart. I still fly with her. Um, I don't, sorry, I don't fly with her. I flew with her for a year after that until I left. Um, she became my permanent partner, one of the best partners I ever had. Um anyway, side note, uh, we go ahead and we take off. And in order to get out of this area that we were in to the area that we were going, we had to actually go up over kind of a mesa. It's like a mesa is a big mountain with a plateau on top of it, and it lasts, you know, it kind of goes lengthways aways. And uh so we've been in flight for about 10 to 15 minutes, and we get up to this mesa, and the ceiling has come down to where we couldn't get up over on the route that we wanted to go. So we um pilot tells us, and his communication was phenomenal. He turned around and he said, Hey, I can't get up over. We're gonna fly to the left a little bit, and I'll try to find a way through. And this is not abnormal for this area. We've done this multiple times. Um, you just have to see a clear path through. We're not going into the clouds, we're not doing anything illegal. Um, so this was a common practice and nothing that had me concerned. So we head off to the left and I'm still kind of doing patient care. So every now and then I glance up and he's I can tell he's trying to find a way up over this mesa. About five minutes later, he took, he turns and he said, Hey, I can't get through. I'm gonna turn around and we're gonna go back to the facility. So I'm like, Okay, yeah, not a problem. But that was the plan that we had, and then that's just what we have to do. So we turn around, we turn the helicopter around, and literally right in front of us now, facing the other way, is the storm. It is right there and it has closed in behind us. So we're surrounded by a storm that we can't get through. One thing I forgot to say earlier is helicopters don't fly in the clouds. Um, there's something called spatial uh awareness that you lose when you when you get into the clouds, you don't know what's up, down, sideways. And this is actually what kills so many helicopter pilots and and and um passengers is they inadvertently get into this cloud condition and you you don't know what's up or down. Um so very, very dangerous. So pilot brilliantly says, I'm gonna sit down. It's the safest thing to do. I'm just gonna get down on the ground. Um, which we were like, yep, good, good idea. Um, he said, I'm gonna land. So go ahead. Yeah, middle of nowhere. Yep, middle of nowhere. No, no, we couldn't see any roads, no nothing. I know.

SPEAKER_02

Um I I heard this story once, but I'm telling you right now, I wish you could see my hands there sweating. I've seen it.

SPEAKER_00

Um so um we're kind of flying over a canyon, and he's he's like, I'm gonna land in the canyon because then we'll be out of the weather. And I don't something about this, I was just like, no, don't land in the canyon. Let's let's try to find a road somewhere. And so he's like, okay, I'll briefly try to find one, but then we have to get on the ground. So we actually did see after you know 10 seconds of flying, just this like little, it's like a little ATV trail, kind of a it, I'd say it was a dirt road, but it's covered in snow, because at this point it's February, it's everything's covered in snow up there. We're at about we're probably at about 7,500, 8,000 feet at that point um of elevation. And so um, not no roads, anything like that. So we see this little trail, and and I'm like, okay, it's set down there. And this is something I didn't really think about it, but when we started to set down, we're setting down on the snow. I I got a little bit concerned because you don't know what's underneath the snow. Are we setting down on a fence? Are we setting down on some farm equipment? Like, what is under the snow? You don't know, right? So I I that was really the I got a little nervous setting down. Um, but we did. We sat down, and then within I'd say two minutes of setting down, we were in a complete whiteout. The blizzard hit, and we were we couldn't see anything. We're totally in the middle of nowhere with this super sick patient. Um and so a feeling of relief initially, because you're on the ground, so you're safe. But then you start thinking about now what? What do we what do we do now? We have this patient and we have this oxygen that he needs that we're gonna run out of. So we talk briefly about let's keep the helicopter running until we will until we have to shut it down for fuel purposes. We'll leave enough fuel on board to be able to get out of here if the storm clears, but we want to keep warm, right? This is a this is a legit blizzard. Uh so um we agreed we'd keep the helicopter running. We plugged all of our equipment in, made sure our batteries were all charged. We had no cell service, um, but we were able to reach dispatch on the SAT phone to let them know, give them coordinates. So this all sort of happened at the same time. Um, our pilot called dispatch and gave them the coordinates of where we're at, told them we had a sick patient and they needed to get somebody out here. So dispatch says, sure, we'll call you back. Um, at that point, um, I was talking to my partner and we need to we need to actually get this guy on some different form of oxygen because right now we're gonna run out of oxygen in two hours if we're on this normal breather. And I'm not sure how long it's gonna take people to get up here because we are legitimately in the middle of nowhere. So in a form, in a blizzard with a in a blizzard, correct, right? Um, and so we had a lot of discussion about the best oxygen delivery for him to preserve our oxygen, and all I kept thinking about was if we could just find a way to where he only got oxygen when he breathed, so oxygen on demand, because I know that there's you know older people out there that have oxygen concentrators that actually go off when they take a breath, right? So in my mind, that was similar to what a bipap would do, but I didn't want to put him on bipap because they don't want to run through our oxygen. Um, we did talk about intubating him because intubation is the safest form of oxygen control that you can have, but we discussed if we were to intubate him, we'd have to use oxygen to pre-oxygenate him in order to intubate him, which would, you know, run our oxygen down a little bit. And then the other part was I'd only been flying for a year. I actually had never intubated a patient yet. And that scared the heck out of me. I mean, I'd done tons of mannequin intubations, and I'm not gonna be like, oh yeah, I can do this. It was it was terrifying because I I do believe that when you make the choice to intubate a patient, you're sort of signing a contract for their life at that point, right? I'm taking the one tool away from you that you need to live, and I'm gonna do that myself. And so I had better know what I'm doing. And uh, that was the worst scenario for an intubation that I could think of. Running out of oxygen, middle of a blizzard, tiny little helicopter, and it's dark.

SPEAKER_01

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SPEAKER_00

You know, you just have to take those factors into consideration. So we have something on board called a ram cannula, and that is a basically a big nasal cannula that they use for children for giving basically putting them on BIPAP without having a mask because kids don't tolerate it. So it's a a nasal cannula that's large that interfaces with a ventilator, and you can put like a little bit of goop around their nose to create a seal. And if you can keep their mouth closed, it's essentially bipap. So we carry these for kids. Um in we decided to put this on our patient so that, and put the put the ventilator on a bipap setting so whenever the patient took a breath, it would give him oxygen. It would trigger the ventilator to give him a little bit of oxygen. All the oxygen would go into his lungs rather than as opposed to a nasal cannula where they're just getting the free flow of oxygen and you lose it, you don't need it, because we're thinking oxygen conservation. And so we actually set him up with this RAM cannula on the ventilator, gooped his nose up, kept his mouth shut. But then we have the problem that he's tachypnik, right? So he's breathing 40 to 50 times a minute. What do you do? So totally out of protocol. And this this is what's crazy because uh these are things that nurses might lose their license over, as far as you're doing something that gosh, you're you're doing something you probably shouldn't be doing. But I I didn't feel like I had any choice at this point. So I gave this patient Atavan, I gave him a lot of Atavan, I slowed his breathing down. And I did not know if I was um taking away his compensation. I I actually didn't know, but it was the only thing I could think of to slow his breathing down so that he wasn't burning through our oxygen. Because once he burned through that oxygen, I had no doubt in my mind that he was gonna die. Like, no doubt. To the point where we even discussed once we switched him over what we were gonna do with him when he died, because we didn't know when we were gonna be able to be to be rescued. In the midst of all this, we'd gotten a phone call from dispatch that said that they got a hold of search and rescue. Search and rescue told us that they actually had had a call in that same area earlier that day that they were not able to get to for whatever reason. Um, it it was a um it's just a very remote area with a lot of difficulties. Um, so they had told us at that time that they actually didn't know if anybody was going to be able to come up and get us. So we really started thinking about what we were gonna do with this patient when he passed away. Um, of course, we didn't discuss that until we had enough Adavan on board that he couldn't hear us, but that was a very genuine discussion. So switched him over, gave him Adavan, did get his breathing down to about 12 times a minute. I had learned years and years ago from a very wise doctor that you can't actually kill anybody with Atavan. We had a patient that came into the ER that had an Atavan overdose, and he was like, I'm not worried about this. You can't die from Atavan. So that always stuck with me randomly. And and I kept I thought, and so that's why I chose Atavan. It's like I'm gonna kill this patient, not intentionally, but I'm sure gonna slow his breathing down. Um you had to do in that moment.

SPEAKER_02

You you were yeah, what do you do? You were thinking, I did yeah, critically thinking, as we are trained to do as nurses, to try to do your best to save this patient's life. Why let's just go ahead and mention you guys' lives were also in danger. You're in the middle of a storm in a helicopter, not knowing if anybody's gonna come get you, and you don't know what the weather conditions are gonna be like. Your life is in danger, that patient's life is in danger. You did the best with what you've got. So, yeah. So you've got him, you've got his advan on board, you're breathing, and now now you guys are having some serious conversations.

SPEAKER_00

Yep. So at this point, and it and it's funny because you talk about, yeah, our lives were in risk, but I I promise you that that thought never entered my mind until later on. So at that point, we're still sort of focused on the patient. So now we're having the conversations of it's been it's been an hour and a half, we have to shut the helicopter off because we need to leave enough fuel on board to be able to fly out if we need to, which we probably wouldn't be able to do anyway because everything's iced up. Uh, once you shut it down, things ice up and you you you can't fly it. So um we have what we call a helicopter confessional. We tell each other things, we talk to each other, we um we just we really keep the mood light. And that is what they they tell you in survival training is your mindset is the only way that you will survive something. Um, so we have these conversations um about you know, our lives, our families, everything. I mean, we tell each other everything. It's it was it it made the time go by quite fast, but the whole time, all of us know that this patient's gonna die. Our oxygen's going down, there's nothing we can do, uh, and they're not gonna be able to get to us. And we did get a phone call. It was about four hours in. I want to say four, four and a half hours into this. We've been sitting in the dock for three and a half hours, and they they call and say, You guys need to prepare for the worst. We lost contact with search and rescue because they also don't have cell service. So they got to a point where they were trying to get to us that they couldn't hear from us. They they didn't, they weren't able to get communication through. So they said, We don't know where search and rescue is. Um, one of the other pilots from our base had actually taken his four-wheel drive and tried to get to us, and he was the one that said, I can't get up there. Like there's no way I'm gonna be able to get up there. And so they called us, they said, You guys need to prepare for the worst. And at that point, everybody in the helicopter just got very quiet. It that was the point where we actually lost hope. We had had hope up until that point, and that was the point where, and I like I'm actually and chills just talking about it. I can't even tell you or describe to you that feeling of patient's gonna die, and now actually I don't know if we'll make it either. Like, I don't know because it was very, very cold. Um is is bad, is bad. And and then what really hit me the hardest was that I had taken this patient out of a facility that had exactly what he needed at that time and put him in my helicopter that now has nothing that he needed to stay alive. And the gravity of what we do hit me so hard. It it still brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. Um, so anyway, we don't really know what we're gonna do. We're actually still sitting there, it's a lot quieter. We're oxygen is down to about 200 psi, which we started out with 1800 psi, now we're down to 200 psi. So we we don't have a lot, we don't have a lot of time left for the patient. Um, and I saw headlights. I saw headlights. And and I we if you could have jumped up and down for joy in that helicopter, that is what we would have done. Because all of a sudden, everything was gonna be all right. We had these headlights right in front of us, and uh, so these two vehicles, not ambulances, not ambulances, these two four-wheel drive trucks show up with six Navajos who was what what consisted of their search and rescue that had literally spent the last five hours building a road and running off the road to get to us, just to get to us. Little old us, you know, we we're nothing. Uh, they risked their lives to get to us. So they showed up. We had to take the patient out of the helicopter. We don't have a stretcher because they have pickup trucks. That's all they could get up there. Um, so we had to wrap him in a blanket, take him out of the helicopter, put him in the backseat of a truck, and um take him down off of this mountain. Um, we unloaded some of our equipment. We weren't able to get into the back of the helicopter, which coincidentally was where the survival bag was, because it was frozen shut. It was, you couldn't even get the door open.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it was frozen shut. None of us could feel our hands, feet, any any of that. Um, and so we uh these beautiful, amazing six search and rescue gentlemen got us out of this helicopter into the back. They had bought oxygen with them. So we hooked the patient up to oxygen and we spent the next four hours sliding down off of this mountain on this road that they had built for us, literally with their own hands and whatever to get us off of this mountain. We ran off the road a couple of times. Um, and I just remember my partner and I just kept looking at each other, like, can you believe this is happening? And she's like, No, no, I can't. I mean, it just it was it wasn't funny, but it was like, what are we doing? It's three o'clock in the morning and we're sliding down this snowy dirt road in the back of a pickup with a patient that's hooked up to oxygen in a ventilator. Um, so we got down off of the um off of this road to an ambulance, waiting for us at the actual road, where we were able to transfer the patient into the ambulance. Upon time, I did actually intubate him because he had gone apneic periodically. I don't know whether he had just finally run out of um just just run out of all of his reserves, or if my Atavan had really hit when he started to warm up a little bit, the Atavan probably really started to take effect. Um, and so I I did intubate him, got my first intubation, which was not the most exciting part of the day. People always talk about truck in the back of the back of the in the back of the ambulance. So I actually waited till we got down to the ambulance. So a lot a lot safer. Yeah, but still people talk about oh, hey, when was your first intubation? I was like, Well, it wasn't the most exciting part of my day, which usually it is, but was not that day. Yeah, right, right. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02

So you're so yeah, intubated. You guys are just in shock that everybody has survived this.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Yeah, especially the patient. The patient was obviously your primary concern because he was the one in the most danger. Out of the four of us in that helicopter, that patient was in the most danger. Um, so yeah, uh, drove an hour back to the facility where they knew we were coming and they were amazing. Warm blankets, um, warm kind words got us taken care of. Um, and then uh we were able to be driven back to base where we were taken off the line for a couple of days to debrief and process, and because then it does hit you what you've just been through. Um and uh yeah, so what was that like?

SPEAKER_02

What when you say you because I'm thinking, and as not, I'm an emergency nurse, but I am not a flight nurse. I don't, I've never I've never done flying, but we see a lot, we know that Medavax constantly uh it's maybe they're bringing more attention, I shouldn't say constantly, but it feels like quite often we're seeing so many accidents, and you know that that's a risk. So, how did it feel? What does that feel like when you take a flight knowing you may not land? And now you are in a position where you were in it. What does that feel like to this day?

SPEAKER_00

Um, to this day, it feels like a little surreal, but it also brings a resounding voice where safety is always first and they teach us safety. They teach us safety to the nth degree in New Hire all the time, but you can't take into account the feelings that you have when you want to save a life. When you the drive that you have to get in that helicopter because you know you're somebody's only hope to make it through the day, so that takes precedence over your own safety, and it shouldn't. And I will preach that it doesn't to anybody, but when you put yourself in that position, you make that choice because you know that you're somebody's only hope. And how do you take that away from somebody? I all the safety in the world can't take away somebody's desire to go save somebody else's life, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, sacrificing your own life, Claire, to save somebody else. I mean, that is that's what nurses do. And that's I I just have to say, and I'm everybody listening right now have made it through this podcast and your palms aren't sweating. I just I don't wow, a goosebumps, something has had to have happened. But I I want to use you as an encouragement because you embody what nurses are. You are um compassionate and kind and competent and courageous. And um wow, your skill, you're willing to sacrifice. I I commend you. And I think you telling this story is just such an honor. After everything that's going on in nursing right now, it's it's tough out there. And we all know it. Nursing is a very hard field right now. And this is, I'm glad that we had you come on and tell this story because this is what I want us to not lose hope that this is who we are. You are the face of what nursing is. Smart, competent, kind, compassionate, courageous, all of the things. And what you're saying now, even in such a tragedy, you're still out there doing it. You are still out there flying, taking care of these patients and setting the example that um, you know, this is what nurses do. We save lives. We go out there and we help others. And I want no nurse to forget who we are, no matter what is happening around us. Don't lose sight. Don't lose sight of who we are as nurses, and no matter what society or patients or administration, whatever anybody says, be a clear. I love it. It feels like I feel like I need a button because you really are an inspiration with this story. And I'm I'm really glad that you're out there and and teaching other nurses um that even in the worst, you have persevered and it's such an honor. So what um thank you. What are some key takeaways? What I feel like you need to tell some nurses, especially coming into flight nursing. I know lots of my baby nurses that I've trained over the years um have wanted to go into flight, and that's their goal. What's some advice that you can give the new nurses and and the experienced nurses out there, in flight or not in flight?

SPEAKER_00

The biggest piece of advice that I could give you is you already have a voice because you wouldn't be in nursing if you didn't. Uh, that same voice that makes people sometimes difficult to get along with because you speak your mind, you speak your truth, you advocate for your patience, you go against um perhaps a doctor or an or another nurse because you know something's right. So you have a voice already when you get into flight nursing. Don't lose that voice because you are so enamored by what it is, all of a sudden you are this big bad flight nurse and people look up to you. Keep that voice for yourself because there is going to come a time where you have to say no to a flight, or you have to say, hold on a second, there has to be a different way to do this, or another way to do this. Don't lose your voice. Keep keep a hold of everything that has gotten you to this point and don't let that stall. Stay an advocate for yourself. I and I can say above your patients, but I know that I know you won't, because that's not what we do as nurses. I I wish you would. I wish I could, honestly, but I can't. So, but stay that voice and and be that voice for yourself. In all nurses, not just in flight, when you go to work, you are risking your life because emergency nursing, med search nursing, I see new, they all come with risks, especially in this day and age with violent families, violent patients, um, bullying in the workplace, uh, bullying from corporate corporations. Uh just keep on doing what you're doing because I promise you that the lives that you're touching, not just the parent, the patients that you take care of, but the family members that see you doing that, are going to look up to you and remember you 10 years from now. Um, just a very, very brief story. I took my daughter to go to colonoscopy, and the nurse that took her IV out looked at me and said, Oh, hey, do you still work in the emergency department? And I didn't recognize her. And I said, Oh, no, I don't. I'm I'm working in flight now. And she's like, I just want you to know that you're the reason I became a nurse. And I don't actually, I don't know who she was, but at some point I must have touched her life, whether she was a family member of a patient, enough and not even known it. So you go out there and know when you come home from a really awful day, that even during the course of that day, you've touched somebody's life and made them the next best, greatest nurse. So just keep doing what you're doing and know in your core that you're doing the right thing. That's awesome, Claire.

SPEAKER_02

I don't, this has just been such a pleasure and such an honor to have you on. And for those of you listening out there, um, we'll have some information um for you to if you want to ask Claire questions or um just need some encouragement or support. This is this has been great. And I just want to thank you again for being vulnerable to tell your story, to be honest. You are such an inspiration. And um just from hearing you talk, you really have touched my life. And uh the story that you told has just been awesome. And it has been my honor and my pleasure to be able to have you on and tell it. So thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Jen. And thank you. Thank you guys out there for listening. Absolutely thank you so much. And I I hope to see you next year at the BCN conference. And all you guys listening out there, I hope this story really encouraged you. And just remember, it's a great day to be a nurse. You guys mean so much. You are so important, you are so valuable, and it is just an honor that um I get to serve all of you. Y'all have a great day. Thanks again, Claire. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

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