Features

Tim Boyd '08G was a photojournalist whose work appeared in the New York Times and many other newspapers before he entered the UNH direct-entry master's in nursing program at the age of 38 to start a new career as an emergency room nurse at York (Maine) Hospital.

What's it like being a male nurse?
I'm not a "male nurse," because I take care of females, too. I'm a professional. All nurses are professional. I introduce myself as "Nurse Boyd"—not "I'm Tim." I do that for two reasons. One is to go against the stereotype. The second reason is that someone who has a title is a professional. I believe physicians have earned their title as "Doctor" and I earned my title as "Nurse." The classic reaction you get from people is, "Wow, you're a smart guy. Why aren't you a doctor?" Well, I don't want to become a doctor. Would you talk to an engineer and say, "Why aren't you a lawyer?" Nursing is a profession in and of itself. I'm a nurse and I'm proud of what I do.

Why don't more men go in into nursing?
There are probably about 94 percent women in the field. I'd like to see more men in nursing, not just from a gender standpoint. I look at it as a huge pool of potential nurses. Nursing is considered a woman's job—but it's a job, it's a profession, it's a career. It's both mentally challenging and physically challenging.

Did your first career prepare you for your second?
As a journalist, asking questions comes easy to me. And I've photographed everyone from criminals to presidents, so I know a little bit about what everybody does. It helps break down the barriers for someone who might be nervous or scared. Then maybe their heart rate will decrease, maybe their blood pressure will decrease. When I'm talking to them for a couple of minutes, I'm actually assessing them: Are they having difficulty speaking? Do they have long-term and short-term memory recall? Do they know who they are, where they are, and why they are here?

Do you have any funny anecdotes?
Typically every day is funny, but a lot of it is definitely inside humor. Dark humor abounds. Not too long ago we had a sad situation where a patient had ingested a large number of pills. I was trying to get activated charcoal into the patient. We had to put a tube through the patient's nose and into the stomach, and I'm pushing this charcoal in a semi-liquid form through a small hole in the tube with a large syringe. It was extremely difficult and I'm pushing and pushing, and all of a sudden the thing slipped and this stuff went everywhere—all over the patient's face, 10 or 15 feet in the air. The nurse who's working with me is covered in charcoal, I'm covered. It looked like a giant squid had exploded. The housekeeper just happened to be walking by at that moment. You can imagine the scene.

Sounds like a scene on the TV show "Scrubs"—do you watch that?
Yeah, I do actually. Another classic show that comes to mind is "ER." There's a lot of controversy about these shows and how they depict nurses stereotypically sometimes. What I say is, so what. That's television, that's not reality, and I enjoy the shows for what they are.

What's one of the hardest things about your job?
Triage—it's tough. You have a very stoic person putting on a brave face versus somebody screaming in pain. It's hard to judge. That's why those "vital signs" tell us vital information. The person who's very stoic might be pale white, have low blood pressure, maybe has gastrointestinal bleeding—that's very dangerous. Triage is very important. It's the nurse who sees the patient first. That's why nursing is the front line in the medical field, typically.

What do you like about your job?
At York Hospital, we see 60 to 100 patients a day. There's no rhyme or reason to it. But it's also exciting, like going from 0 to 60 in a matter of seconds. We'll have a few patients and then the next thing, we've got three ambulances. I like that fast pace. And you can see almost immediately the effects of what you do.

What are your thoughts about the nursing shortage?
Nurses need to be advocates for themselves. We need to show that nursing isn't just caring, there's science, too. And with science comes professionalism and with professionalism comes respect. Pay is getting better. There are midwives, nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists. Few people realize that nurses are researchers—they're researching things like drug-resistant staph infections. We're there with the patients, figuring out what's wrong. Not to diminish the work of physicians, but people don't go to the hospital for a physician's care. They're going because they need to be watched. It's the nurses who are there 24 hours. Nurses do so much more than people realize, and we need to recruit people.

 Easy to print version