What I do is that I clean people's
blood. I hook them up to a machine and I get
rid of all the bad guys, all the
antibodies that are in their blood,
and I throw it out and give them back
good plasma without the antibodies in it. The dialysis machine,
it cleans and filters the kidney. In Plasma Apheresis, what we do is we clean the blood, and there is a centrifuge.
>>Patti has been working
at St. Michael's Hospital for 41 years,
being called in the middle of the
weekend, in the middle of the night to
attend to a critically ill person and
still remains so positive and so upbeat
and still so supportive of every single
patient that she treats.
>>They're there for two and a half
hours, maybe, and we sit there and we
talk and we get to know each other very well. And
we get to know all the family members and
we get to know everything about each
other, and this could happen as many
times as seven to 47 times, it just depends on
how bad the bad guys are.
>>A specific gentleman comes to mind who was very fearful of the system, was not complying with a
lot of treatments that we were proposing.
She sat down, she took his hand and just
said, "look you have a very bad disease. This
is what needs to be done, and yes you
have to cooperate with us." That message
was sort of repeated and reinforced
day after day until he accepted. She was
able to form a strong therapeutic alliance
with a patient that most of us had
difficulty reaching.
>>Very rare diseases that we deal with, and all of them are pretty much autoimmune diseases,
which is the very tricky part of your whole body.
People are always saying "why pick me, why me?"
We don't have an answer. But our goal is to cure them and not come back.
>>And how they differently treat her, she always
approaches everyone with that same
helpful attitude, ready to give it
all to make them feel better. And I think
that is what a nurse in the true sense of the word means to me.
>>All they really want is a very brief idea of what's
going on but the most that they need is the
support,
the level of compassion
you can give them, because that's all
right. That, right there in there, that
they can grab onto and grasp.
