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TOWARD REFLECTIVE PRACTICEAnne Ryder: A broadcast journalist’s deep connection with nurses by Leslie Flowers The emaciated, mentally ill woman screamed when Anne Ryder tried to bathe her. Ryder paused, then tried again. The woman screamed again.
It was 1996 and Ryder, a broadcast journalist, was volunteering at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries for Charity in Calcutta, West Bengal, India. She was in Calcutta to bring back a series about Mother Teresa’s work to her NBC news affiliate in Indianapolis. She ended up bringing home much more—life-changing experiences and interviews with the nun, the first and last interviews granted by the sister to an American in more than a decade. At the time, Ryder was expecting her first child and, like many pregnant women in their first trimester, didn’t feel so great. It didn’t help that the room temperature was above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. As she again approached the woman she was trying to bathe, she searched for a way to gain her trust. “I put everything down—my cup of water, my soap bar, my washcloth and, more important, my ego and my agenda,” recalls Ryder. “Then I placed my hands on her gently and started massaging her back. In a little while, she allowed me to bathe her.” Ryder describes the experience as sacred. “A transference occurred. In that moment, I stopped thinking about myself and how hot and queasy I was. I was present for her. Even though I was there to help her, she helped me.” The lesson Ryder learned that day, and continues to learn and communicate to her audiences, is that if you open up and take time to connect with another person, you receive a gift that stays with you for life. The gift returned The first night at Indiana University Hospital, she was in a haze of drugs and overwhelming grief after emergency surgery and the loss of her son. A nurse walked gently into Ryder’s room with talcum powder. “She just dusted her hand lovingly on my back as I cried,” Ryder recalls. “The lesson from Calcutta came full circle. I knew how it felt to be cared for in that way.” Ryder asked her husband if the woman who rubbed her back was an angel. He said that no, she was a nurse. “What I learned in Calcutta and in my hospital room was that connecting with others doesn’t have to be hard,” Ryder says. “It’s doesn’t have to take a lot of time out of your day. But it’s those connections that change people.” Losing Sean, gaining a new life At age 42, when Ryder had her miscarriage, she was at the top of her broadcast career, one of the highest-paid and longest-tenured newscasters in Indianapolis. Their daughter, Jennifer, was 5. Ryder had just stepped down from the 11 p.m. newscast to have more child-friendly hours, but was still anchoring the early-evening news. Jennifer and her mom were at a swimming pool when Ryder, six months along in her pregnancy with Sean, doubled over in pain. Ryder knew something was terribly wrong. Her uterus had ruptured, but hours passed before doctors diagnosed the problem. When she was in her 30s, Ryder had had fibroid tumors removed from her uterus, and the baby that was now in her womb was attached to scar tissue from that surgery. As the fetus grew, it pulled on the weakest spot of the uterus until it tore. Sean was still alive when Ryder arrived at the emergency room, but his body covered evidence of the rupture. “She had all the signs of a gallbladder attack—her pain was high and radiating to her right shoulder,” says Lisa Mayer, RNC, Ryder’s obstetrics nurse. During those three hours, Ryder bled internally, struggled to breathe and started to go into hypovolemic shock. She recalls gripping Mayer’s hand, pleading with her to help. “I was afraid to be alone with Anne on the elevator because she was fading so fast,” Mayer said. “The doctors did not have a definite diagnosis until she was actually on the operating table.” Mayer gave O’Keefe, Ryder’s husband, the news. He was three hours away at a Notre Dame football game when Ryder was taken to the hospital. Talking to O’Keefe on his cell phone as he raced back to Indianapolis, Mayer told him, “Your son has died, and your wife is in grave condition. You need to pray for her.” The gift of Jo On Ryder’s second day in the hospital, the TV star got her first look in the mirror. “It was a scary sight,” Ryder says. “My first words to Jo were pretty inane, considering what I had just gone through. I said, ‘I can’t believe how bad I look.’” Swart, from another part of the state and unaware of her patient’s local notoriety, responded, “Well, honey, I’m from northern Indiana, and I’ve never seen you before in my life. You look fine to me. I’m just here to measure your urine.” Swart continued, “I’m a peeologist. I graduated from Yale with a master’s degree in peeology. Stick with me, and we’ll go straight to the top.” Ryder says she did something she didn’t think was possible two days after losing a child. “I started to laugh.” She remembers Jo’s care of her over the next couple of days as extraordinary. “This spiky-haired nurse walked the line between humor and poignancy perfectly. She made me laugh, and she sat at the edge of my bed when I cried. And she never made me feel like she was rushed—ever,” Ryder says. When she was discharged with a stack of prescriptions, there was one on the bottom of the pile from Swart, who had spent most of her nursing career in pediatric oncology home care and understood well the needs of parents who lose a child. Swart’s prescription said: “May your hearts find the peace they need to heal from the constant pain of separation. Acknowledge your own and each other’s pain. Walk through this together. Know that nothing could have been done differently. Know that love is at the foundation of the pain and the healing.” Ryder and Swart have remained close. They renewed contact when Swart sent Ryder and O’Keefe a card on the one-year anniversary of Sean’s death. “Jo is the best nurse and one of the best friends I’ve ever had,” says Ryder. “I cannot imagine what my life would be like without Jo. She is Mother Teresa to me all the time.” Hope to tell “I realized I was not going to get this time back with my young daughter. I didn’t want to miss any more of her special moments, the recitals and ballgames,” she says. Today, Ryder works from home as a freelance writer and speaker, particularly to audiences of nurses, whom she reveres. “Nurses are extraordinary people,” she says. “I’m in awe of the talent, grace and dedication I’ve seen under immense pressure. Nurses have the opportunity to make a profound impact on patients’ lives every day—and do.” She is writing a book about people whose lives changed in an instant—from an accident, an unexpected phone call, a moment of decision—and who emerge from the experience to help others. One story details the life of a mother who became a crusader for victims’ rights after her four sons were murdered. Another story profiles a trucker who gathered his biker friends to build a stair ramp for the home of an 8-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, confined to a wheelchair. Ryder began telling these stories 14 years ago during her newscast in a segment called “Hope to Tell.” The longest segment of the evening broadcast, it survived four management changes at the station. Lessons of Mother Teresa The cameramen stayed outside in the streets while Ryder helped the sick and destitute inside Missionaries for Charity. After three days, Mother Teresa’s senior nun, Sister Priscilla, asked the American reporter why she was really there. Ryder answered, “I’m here to do whatever God wants me to do in whatever way God wants me to do it.” And she meant it. “They grew to trust me, and three days later Sister Priscilla granted me a 45-minute interview with Mother Teresa,” she says. “It was the experience of a lifetime. “Calcutta was the first time I truly crossed the line as a journalist, where I became a part of the story instead of standing back and taking notes.” In her book and during speaking engagements, Ryder shares the three principles practiced by Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and many ordinary people with extraordinary messages whom she has profiled in “Hope to Tell”: 1) They make time for silence and prayer every day; 2) they live in a state of active gratitude; and 3) they use pain and loss to grow and connect with others who hurt. Ryder hopes that nurses who read and hear these stories open themselves up even more to connecting with their patients—with a joke, a back rub or a tissue for tears—especially when the nurses feel overwhelmed and stressed. “Your patients may never tell you that the time you took to connect with their spirit and your own meant anything to them,” Ryder says. “But I can tell you from my own experience, they’ll know it.” RNL —Leslie Flowers is a journalist and public relations consultant in Indianapolis. Anne Ryder is the keynote speaker at the honor society’s Nov. 2-7 biennial convention in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. For more information about Ryder and her forthcoming book, go to www.anneryder.com. |
