Saluting…

For months now the Indianapolis star has been receiving emails of nominations form hospitals around the state of Indiana nominating nurses for coveted awards through the newspaper.  These awards have been happening now for 10+ years, so they aren’t going away either.  We got over 1100 nominations this year for awards with titles like, “Inspiration in Nursing”, “Nursing Education”, “Community Outreach”, and a few others.  On top of those there is a scholarship that is given out to an essay winner which last year was even doubled by a local business putting almost 5 digits on the big cardboard check that year.  It’s an incredible honor to go and see, and meet the people that have made a difference in so many other peoples lives, and have been so selfless in doing so for what seems like most of theirs.

Some of these nurses have done this all their lives.  In fact the nurse that I’m finishing this year’s video of tomorrow morning has been doing it for over 50 years.  She is now retired, but still volunteers at the clinic to work with children that need extra care.  It’s absolutely mind bending as to what some of these nurses have done in their lives, but consider to be not such a big deal because they love it.

I shot that firefighter photo for our Nursing magazine a few years ago.  I knew at the time that he was our Nurse of the Year but he didn’t.  One of the wonderful parts of my job is that even assignments that might be boring to a lot of people I can use as practice, or I can drag out sometimes depending on what I want.  Nathan Deserved the Nurse of the Year title.  He managed the emergency secction of the hospital, was a volunteer firefighter, and ran the farm that his family lived on.  He didn’t pay someone to run the farm, or lease out the land.  He did it himself.  During the floods of Southern Indiana last year he got onto his 4 wheeler with his emergency kit, and rode across his property to get to people that were trapped in a car.  Yea.  he’s that guy.

The other two shots on here are from Nurses past.  This one is this year’s Scholarship winner.  Wow did she have a story.  To put it short her husband was diagnosed with Cancer, and during his care all the way till the end she was more than blown away by the compassion and care the nurses he had provided him.  She had wanted to go back to school anyway, and now she is in school to be a nurse.  My short version of the story doesn’t do the essay justice, but holy wow Batman!  This is by far one of the coolest most feel good things that I work on for the Indy star newspaper.  Shot a bunch of neat stuff with her in the hour that I had her.  Actually my friend Paul D’Andrea was there shooting for the school and I can only imagine the cool things that he shot that day since he had much longer at the school than I did.  Keep your eyes peeled as I’ll do a post at the end of April when all of this stuff finally comes to fruition.  Until then though, keep checking HERE for updates if you’re a nurse, or you just want some excellent feel good stories.  More Soon.