Terrible memories can still bring Registered Nurse Kim Lima to tears, but she doesn’t let tragedy dim her sunny demeanor, something she’s maintained through 30 years of working in emergency rooms at Yale-New Haven Health and Lawrence + Memorial Hospital.

“I love my job,” she said with a smile.

There are few professionals I respect and appreciate more than nurses, especially emergency room nurses. They’re angels, every one of them. Born with a desire to help others, they willingly face the worst of human conditions in their devoted quest to heal us.

Though it’s impossible, Lima tries to forget the haunting eyes of two young people from a boating accident who didn’t make it. Or the severely burned 17-year-old mouthing “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” to his heartbroken parents before he passed from his self-inflicted immolation.

Of course, she carries more memories, but ER nurses find ways to deal with the physical carnage they witness.

“You talk about it, then tuck it away in its own container,” she said.

She greeted me recently outside the emergency room at the Pequot Medical Center in Groton, Lawrence + Memorial Hospital’s satellite facility east of the Thames River. At the end of another shift of the unexpected, she was still smiling.

Born in Westerly, Lima attended Newport Hospital’s nursing program and spent the summer before graduation as a student nurse intern at Lawrence + Memorial in New London. The hospital hired her when she graduated from Newport in 1989. She’s been there ever since.

After several years in the ER, she moved to the hospital’s cath lab (“I needed a break,” she said.). It was an “awesome experience”, but she eventually returned to the emergency room, where she once again tended to the human damage from drugs, alcohol, weapons, illness, car accidents, disease and injury.

“Controlled chaos at times,” Lima said, adding “but I was born to be a nurse.”

ER nurses do all those medically necessary things that would make most of us cringe, too many to mention. They see, hear, touch and smell unimaginable things. Injured humans can be messy contraptions, and these angels will push themselves to the limits of human endurance to heal and save those in need.

During her years at L+M (the “main house”), the parade of alcohol and drug victims took its toll. Saving such people from themselves remains a daily ER function and a frustrating task as valuable personnel are diverted from the legitimately ill to babysit self-abusers who aren’t always pleasant.

Lima remembers when an elderly “DNR” (“Do Not Resuscitate”) patient arrived at the ER, seriously ill. Not much can be done for a DNR patient, but Lima wanted to at least be sure she didn’t die alone. A drug overdose arrived, and the woman was moved to a hallway to make room.

Lima helped bring the overdose victim “back from the brink,” whereupon he became angry, ripped out his intravenous tubes and threatened those around him.

After the altercation was settled, Lima rushed to check the woman in the hall. She had died. Alone.

Fed up, Lima wanted out.

“The toll of alcohol and drugs on ER staff is very difficult,” Lima said, “and one of the reasons I left the main ER.”

She transferred to the Pequot Medical Center in Groton and loves it there.

Miraculously, in spite of human events that tear at their wellbeing, the challenge and haunting memories of the ER don’t seem to lessen the caring instinct some nurses are truly born with.

I told Lima about an ER nurse I met eight years ago when my dear brother collapsed and died unexpectedly when his heart gave out. After a long night waiting outside L+M’s cath lab, at dawn we numbly followed the ambulance that transferred him to Yale-New Haven’s main facility in New Haven.

We stumbled into the emergency room, overwhelmed with exhaustion, shock and grief, unsure where to turn. As we stood bewildered, the real world nothing but a surreal, muted haze around us, an ER nurse was leaving work, heading home, coat on, bags on her shoulder. She took one look at us and dropped everything to help — off-the clock, on her own time, after a no-doubt busy night shift.

She could have ignored us, but she didn’t. Instead, she made phone calls and personally guided us to my brother.

I fight tears as I write these words, even eight years later, as the memory of her pure compassion returns like it was yesterday. I’ll never forget her.

Kim Lima had been nodding her head, smiling knowingly as I ended my story.

“That’s what we do,” she said, “We help people. I love what I do.”

God bless them all.

John Steward lives in Waterford. He can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com.