Hannah Jordan, RN

During my husband's stay in the hospital, I met a nurse who became someone I will never forget. There are nurses who provide excellent medical care, and then there are nurses who somehow find a way to care for the person lying in the bed and the family standing beside it. Hannah did both.

My husband had just had his second surgery in 7 days. He could not respond to her, but she talked to him. She explained what she was doing before she did it. She told him what was happening with his care and reassured him throughout it all. She treated him with such dignity, tenderness, and compassion. Even with all the machines, medications, tubes, and monitors surrounding him, she never lost sight of the fact that the person in that bed was my husband.

There is one night in particular that I will never forget. They were trying to wean him off one sedation medication onto another medication. He was struggling. He was restless and uncomfortable, and I was standing there watching the person I loved more than anything suffer - he was giving up - then Hannah came on shift. She recognized what he needed. She advocated for him. She worked to make him comfortable and restored a sense of peace to him that I had been desperately hoping for. I remember watching the change in him and feeling like, for the first time that night, I could breathe.

I have always thought of her as the nurse who saved my D that night, but she also saved me. When Hannah was caring for him, I didn’t feel like I had to watch every monitor, question every change, or wonder whether someone noticed when he was uncomfortable. I trusted her. For those hours, I could stop trying to understand and control something that was completely beyond my control and simply be his wife. There is a helplessness that comes with standing beside your husband in the hospital, watching machines breathe for him and knowing there is nothing you can personally do to make him better.

During that time, I needed someone to give me a reason to believe he was going to be okay; she gave me that. She gave me hope. When she was caring for him, I felt safe enough to believe that he was going to make it through this. And for a while, he did. He improved enough to come off the ventilator and eventually leave the unit.

My husband never had the opportunity to actually meet Hannah, but he knew who she was because I told him about her. Through my stories, he knew the person who had cared so compassionately.

In the end, he did not survive. A year later, I still think about Hannah. On the anniversary of that night, my heart immediately went back to the nurse who walked into his room and changed everything for us. The comfort she gave him mattered. The compassion she showed him mattered. And what she did for me mattered more than I could ever adequately put into words.

There are many things from that time that have blurred together, but I will never forget Hannah. I will never forget how safe I felt when he was in her care. I will never forget the way she spoke to him as though he could hear every word. I will never forget the compassion she showed my husband when he could not advocate for himself. And I will never forget that when I needed someone to give me hope, she did. To me, that is what extraordinary nursing looks like.

Hannah did not simply take care of my husband; she cared for him as a person and she cared for me as his wife. Damon may never have had the opportunity to thank Hannah himself, but I hope this nomination can in some small way do that for him.
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Ms. Jordan has a heart of gold. She shows compassion and love for her patients as well as her co-workers. She always goes above and beyond the call of duty. Her bedside manner exceeds that of any nurse I've come into contact with. She's a true angel and a Godsend.