A day at Delnor Hospital during Nurses Week

A middle-aged man faints twice at a train station.

Another decides something just isn't right with the increasing discomfort in his gut.

A slender young woman has a "weird" feeling in her arm and pain in her chest.

That's what emergency nurse Julie Gunlogson saw Monday morning during the second day of national Emergency Nurses Week at Delnor-Community Hospital in Geneva.

Gunlogson, who's worked at Delnor for 21 years, has seen some interesting things in her career. Like the time a car hit a horse and the horse's body passed through the car. The passengers came in covered in manure. "We had to fumigate the place after that," she said.

The emergency department sees nearly 40,000 patients a year.

Gunlogson has many certifications on her name badge. She's a patient-care coordinator (what they used to call a charge nurse) and a trauma nurse specialist. She also is a med e-tech, helping to design computer software for keeping track of what happens in the department. Nurses all are trained to answer radio calls from ambulance crews.

"We treat all ages, all stages," she said. "We have to be ready for anything."

There are 20 private rooms and two trauma rooms in the emergency room. Each nurse is assigned four rooms and a portable phone, which is in near-constant use as they talk to each other, the laboratory, other departments. "Everything is off except his underpants -- I know, I know -- he's funny about that," she tells a surgical nurse while reviewing what needs to be done before a patient can go up to the operating room to get his appendix taken out.

She gives going-home instructions to the man who fainted, offering a dry T-shirt to wear instead of the sopping dress shirt he wore in.

Gunlogson interviews the woman, learning she's had the chest pain before, takes birth control pills and has had surgeries for a congenital leg deformity. The leg problem and the birth control put her at risk of developing a clot, which might have lodged in her chest.

She's on the move a lot, back and forth, from rooms to a desk to the pharmacy cabinet to the doctor's desk to the supply alley …

Gunlogson has worked in Delnor's emergency department for most of her career. She'll finish her bachelor's degree online in January and intends to get a master's degree.

"To be a manager or teacher you have to have the master's," she said.

Differences since 1986? Nurses have a lot more say in the care of their patients. There are standing protocols and orders that don't require a doctor's approval, such as giving anti-nausea drugs right away for somebody with abdominal pain, starting IV lines, ordering some tests, giving pain medicine.

Volume has gone up. On overnights, it used to be a doctor could catch a nap. "That hasn't happened in a long time now," Gunlogson said.

And more of the people they see are extremely obese, meaning nurses have had to learn different ways of lifting patients, including using specialized equipment, so they don't hurt themselves.

Families can stay with patients, even during resuscitation. "That is a big change for us. It's a little bit uncomfortable," she said, but it turns out people leave with a sense that they did everything they could for the patient, as opposed to wondering what is going on behind those doors.

There are a lot more men in nursing. But people still think any man there is a doctor, and that bugs the women. They say that if a male nurse and a female nurse are in a room, the minute the male nurse leaves, the patient invariably asks, "What was that doctor's name?"

"It happens every time," Gunlogson says, with emphasis. "They never guess the woman is the doctor."