It’s nurse’s week. Happy Nurse’s Week to all my fellow nurses! For those of you who don’t know, I am a nurse and have been for 5 and a half years now. I can’t even believe it. Some days I think I’ve seen it all in my short 5 and half years, and other days I still feel like a newbie with a lot more to learn.
I have thought about this post a lot. I have thought about all the ways I could write it and express all my feelings and frustrations about being a nurse, and even now, as I begin to write, I don’t even know which way I’m going to go with it, so here goes.
Being a nurse has, by far, been the hardest thing I’ve done in my life thus far. It has been the most stressful thing. It has been the most physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting thing. Talk about a struggle. I’m really making this sound appealing, aren’t I? Well, it’s true. It’s also true that being a nurse isn’t for everyone, so I thought I would make up a list of reasons why you shouldn’t become a nurse. Here we go. Read the list all the way until the end.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to take care of 6 patients at a times, all of which are very ill and need you at the same time.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to take care of the 6 patients above and also have to be in charge of your unit. Which requires figuring out staffing assignments, helping your other staff nurses with their patients, being their resource, and dealing with management, administration, assigning admissions, and doing damage control with unhappy patients and families.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to find your patient passed away in his sleep and have to prepare his body for the morgue.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to see abused and neglected children get so injured, and then get discharged right back into the situation that they came from.
- Don’t become a nurse if you can’t stomach seeing a skull cap cut off to try to control a head bleed.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want surgeons to yell at you on a daily basis.
- Don’t become a nurse if you want to work in a fully staffed department. That’s not happening.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want your manager to question you on why you haven’t updated the white board when you just spent 12 overnight hours just trying to keep your patients alive.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to take work home with you. We all do.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to do CPR on a healthy 22 year old who got shot in the chest.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to cry with a patient’s family as they prepare to take their child off life support.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to see a 3 year old smile for the first time after their open heart surgery.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to watch a patient walk for the first time in 4 months since their car accident.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to celebrate with parents as their baby finally graduates from the NICU.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to feel the excitement of hearing “we got a pulse” after completing a code.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to see a baby take it’s first breath
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t like to get handmade cards from your pediatric patients thanking you for your care.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to see your long term dialysis patient finally get a new kidney.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want to help a new mother breastfeed for the first time.
- Don’t become a nurse if you don’t want the satisfaction of saving a life after doing an emergency open heart surgery.
This list could go on and on and on. But my points is: don’t become a nurse if the second half of this list won’t make up for the things on the first half of the list. Because guess what? You’re going to get both. You’re going to get the long, hard hours. The loss. The frustration. The tears. The pain. The abuse. But you’ll also get the smiles. The gratefulness. The hugs. I would say that I get about one of those amazingly good days for every 5 of those painfully bad days. But I am still a nurse because it’s worth it. That one good day is worth all the other bad ones.
I didn’t intend for this post to be negative, I intended for it to be truthful and eye-opening. This nurse’s week, recognize the nurses around you realizing that they chose to become a nurse for the reasons on the latter half of this list. But they still have to face the reasons on the first half of the list every. single. day. And it’s hard. But we do it. Being a nurse has been my most Splendid Struggle yet. Happy Nurse’s Week!