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It’s easy to let Deborah Tuggle, MN, RN, a critical
care clinical nurse specialist, tell her own nursing
story. It’s one of family tradition and caring,
entrepreneurship and education and a passion for the
best in all of nursing, not just her specialty of cardiac
care.
Tuggle tells her story with the folksiness of her critical
care continuing education courses and lectures, and
in the unshakable Southern accent of her native Louisville,
Ky.
“My father’s a doctor and we’ve got
medical people way back eons. My dad and his dad and
his dad before him and on and on back. A lot of doctors.
All the way to Samuel Mudd, who took care of John Wilkes
Booth. We’re still trying to clear his name,”
she said with a laugh.
So the decision to become a nurse, although her father
wanted her to be a physician, wasn’t something
she labored over. On television, critical care looked
cool, Tuggle said, and after graduating from the University
of Kentucky nursing school in 1976, “I got into
it and found this really is neat. People are just so
emotional in that setting. You can really do a lot for
family members if not for the patients themselves. I’ve
always liked that part of nursing. I like the family
connection a lot.
“I have a huge family. A lot of them are elderly
and I spend time monitoring their care … helping
them navigate through the health care system and making
sure they get the care they should get,” she said.
That’s particularly true since Tuggle returned
to Louisville five years ago from Washington state,
where her husband, now retired, was stationed with the
Air Force.
It was at the University of Washington that Tuggle
earned a master’s degree and the desire to teach
tugged so hard at her heart that she went into business
for herself.
“To be honest, I could not get a job in my hospital
as an educator without getting paid less than I was
making as a 3-to-11 staff nurse,” she said. “They
weren’t paying me for my master’s and they
were actually going to be paying me less because I wouldn’t
get my shift differential. I was horrified and insulted.”
After finding that other hospitals wanted her to handle
orientation, fire drills and other things she didn’t
want to do, Tuggle decided to capitalize on the ever-changing
nature of critical care—and especially cardiac
care—with continuing education courses. She was
encouraged that university classmates “thought
it was a kick to listen to me talk” because of
her accent and they thought she was funny. “I’m
kind of a ham,” she said.
“I put out a flier for a basic assessment class
and a hemodynamic monitoring class. Two one-day workshops.
I put them on in a restaurant meeting room,” Tuggle
said. “I literally hand-carried these fliers around
and shook hands and hung them in bathrooms. Anything
I could think of.” While she said mostly her friends
came, “I broke even. Didn’t lose a dime.”
Tuggle said the demand for critical care knowledge
is such that she now can earn as much as she wants by
arranging courses, teaching and lining up additional
lecturers. But at age 48, her focus is shifting toward
guest appearances where “I can just do what I
do best, which is put on my talks.”
“Cardiac is in constant motion because it’s
the No.1 cause of death in our country,” Tuggle
said. “I don’t know how to express the change.
All I know is that if it’s been more than two
months since I’ve spoken on a cardiovascular subject,
I have to do another research base and go through another
whole literature review to make sure nothing has come
out.”
She digs into the Internet, attends tons of conferences,
religiously reads pharmaceutical companies’ material
and research literature and works critical care for
an agency to stay up-to-date and relevant to RNs. As
an instructor, she said, “They don’t like
it when they think you’re not relating to what
they’re dealing with. They can read that and they
just tune you out.”
“You know,” she said, “we’re
all going to be sick one day. I want the nurses that
are taking care of me to be top drawer. I want the whole
profession to be top drawer.”
That passion explains why Tuggle also is on the nursing
faculty at the University of Louisville, where she goes
through critical care cases with senior nursing students.
“I don’t do that job because it pays so
well, because it doesn’t,” she said. “I
do it because it’s like something to give back
to the profession: get these people jazzed and excited
about what they’re going to do.”
As for what she is going to do, “My husband and
I want to one day buy a big, obnoxious RV and be just
like country folk traveling around the country. We know
America is a beautiful country and we haven’t
seen all of it. I love to go into little quaint villages
and talk to the locals.”
Wherever she travels, as a lecturer or a tourist, she
will always carry the story of her biggest triumph.
It goes back to her hospital days in Washington when
the director of nursing who was interviewing her for
an educator position, “so rudely told me that
a master’s degree and a quarter will buy you a
cup of coffee.” Tuggle’s indignation was
instant: “How dare you! You’re a nurse.
Don’t say things like that to me. You’re
supposed to promote nursing, not downgrade my achievements.”
Later, that same manager had to sign paperwork for
some of the hospital’s nurses to attend one of
Tuggle’s classes. “Seeing her name on there
just gave me a thrill,” Tuggle said. “That
was like the ultimate.”
Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.
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