In honor of National Nurses Week, I thought I’d pose the question: What are American nurses’ actual responsibilities these days?

Last week while researching a column on Obama’s pandering to various interest groups, I noticed that his campaign website featured a page, grouped with pages for various demographic categories, devoted to Nurses.  What was that about, I wondered?  Was Obama shoring up support for Obamacare with a key segment of the medical profession?

I’d like to suggest another reason: nurses are the new Teachers, the apocryphally underpaid, overburdened sirens of the service industry who make heroic sacrifices to nurture their tender underlings.

Not at the hospital I spent last week at, they didn’t.

After suffering a spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung), I entered the emergency room of a midtown Manhattan hospital for surgery that involved suctioning excess air out of the space between my left lung and chest and allowing the lung to reinflate.  When it collapsed again two days later, doctors performed a more advanced surgery.  Two days with tubes in my chest, a day of observation, and I was home.  read more »