Alex Langenhorst (20BSN) remembers feeling lost in nursing school and questioning whether he should be a nurse at all. A friend’s father encouraged him not to give up. “’It’s not that you don’t want to be a nurse,’” Langenhorst recalls Cormac O’Sullivan, College of Nursing clinical professor, saying. “’You just haven’t found your spot yet.’”
Langenhorst soon realized that his passions outside of school, like being a firefighter, could apply to nursing and found his spot – the emergency department (ED). “That’s where I started, and that’s my home, and I love it,” he says.
Eight months into his first job working at University of Iowa Health Care Medical Center as an ED nurse, an urgent request landed in Langenhorst’s inbox – the College of Nursing needed preceptors. Remembering how lost he felt without a specialty, Langenhorst thought he could help someone find theirs in the ED and he signed up.
When choosing her senior internship, Kate Rechkemmer (24BSN) didn’t know if the ED was the right place. Could she handle critical care and split-second decisions? She decided to give it a try, recognizing how helpful the experience would be for her future as a family nurse practitioner. Her assigned preceptor was Alex Langenhorst.
Thanks in no small part to Langenhorst, Rechkemmer thrived in the ED. He allowed her the space to do things, she recalls, like setting up IV tubing a certain way for a certain antibiotic. “I would watch another nurse do it and be like, okay, it makes sense, but if I'm not trying it, I'm not going to know how to do it,” Rechkemmer says, “but Alex would say, ‘Go try and start it. If you have any questions, come get me and I'll help you, but just go try it yourself’… I think he had a perfect way of teaching because it allowed me to learn from my mistakes; to figure out how I even do this on my own and grow in that way.”
Langenhorst also went above and beyond for Rechkemmer, she recalls. He is currently in a Doctor of Nursing Practice program to become a family nurse practitioner and shared what he is learning. He would quiz her about a laboratory sample or vital signs and teach her about cardiac rhythms during down time. “He could have been doing other things, but he was sitting there, teaching me those things because that's what I wanted to know,” she says.
Langenhorst was surprised to learn something from Rechkemmer as well. Watching her take time to build connections, prioritizing the patient and family at every turn, had an impact. “My perspective is to keep them alive and get them upstairs, but it was nice to have someone who took the time to slow down,” he says. Her actions reminded him that “even though you're doing everything that you can to help keep this person alive, someone needs to prioritize their family, sit with them and explain what's going on.”
Rechkemmer begins her first nursing job working in the Emergency Department at University of Iowa Health Care in August.