Feras Bakara, RN

Today I was the charge nurse on 5 South, and I do not take this lightly when I say it was one of the most challenging and draining shifts of my entire career. The unit was absolute chaos today between deaths, multiple codes, falls, multiple patients going to the ICU, and an active miscarriage.

5 South has many strong nurses, but I would like to acknowledge and shout out one nurse in particular because I believe an encore reward is not even close to enough praise and recognition.

Feras Baraka is a new "baby" nurse, and he was put in some extremely challenging and emotionally draining situations today.

His patient took a turn for the worse right upon the start of his shift, and he pushed for his patient to get a CTH. When the patient went down and vomited, the CT department told him they were canceling the test, and Feras did not let that happen; he called and got orders for anti-nausea meds and ran down to give them so the test could be performed. By pushing for this, he learned the patient had a new acute brain bleed.

All while this was going on, his patient was actively having a miscarriage (obviously not something a cardiac nurse deals with often at all), and Feras was fighting for this patient with every doctor he could and advocating for her and endlessly contacting the OB residents even after they pushed him aside. The outcome was that two OB residents had to manually extract the deceased fetus from his patient because it got stuck.

He had multiple doctors or residents yelling at him for multiple things, but instead of climbing to their level, he asked each and every one, "What could I have done better? How would you like me to approach this situation differently next time? I want to learn what the protocols are for this situation so that I can better treat my patient."

While that was happening, he heard a patient fall and stopped what he was doing and ran to the patient, whom he found was unresponsive on the floor, and picked her up and put her in bed, and thus a code blue was initiated. Even though it was not his patient, he did not leave the area until he knew the team and the nurse were ok and had it handled, to which he went back to his miscarrying patient and his brain bleed patient with new projectile blood vomiting.

Moral of the story: I have obviously worked with a lot of nurses and many of them amazingly strong nurses whom I strive to be like one day, but Feras is a different breed of nurse, and I believe he deserves to be recognized because he is truly the most caring, compassionate, and empathetic nurse I have ever had the privilege to work beside.

I have never seen someone fight for so many patients so hard all at once, have one of the worst shifts, then turn around and ask every nurse surrounding them if there was more he could do to help them out. He deserves all this praise and more.