I recently found myself daydreaming about my career, and it occurred to me just how blessed I am to have been given the opportunity to work as a nurse.  What an amazing thing, to be able to heal others!  So many people believe that physicians are the healers, and oftentimes, they are.  But I think that most of the time, we nurses are the people responsible for encouraging the healing process.  That is to say, those influences outside of the patient  which are responsible for persuading the growth or regeneration of body and mind are most often initiated and influenced by the hands, heart and mind of the nurse.  This is something that so few people in the world have the opportunity and knowledge to do, and we nurses get to be a part of it all.  What a joy!

Who but the nurse is able to spend hours every single day at the patient's side, providing treatments, encouragement, empathy, support and education?  Certainly not the physician, and often, not even the family is able to effectively provide all of those things.  Most of the time, the nurse is the one giving everything, and usually it is in the face of enormous pressure from innumerable outside forces as well.  Doctors wanting information and to submit new orders, pharmacy staff looking to clarify everything, other nurses needing assistance with their patients, CNA's requiring help with their very important and so often under appreciated work, not to mention all of the other patients themselves having one need or request after the other.  All of this leaves even the calmest, most centered nurse feeling like a gigantic eardrum positioned near a chalkboard with a set enormous fingernails forever dragging across it.  That feeling of being too close to screaming occurs to me about once an hour on a very busy night.  Even so, I remember to acknowledge that I am privileged; lucky, to be here, doing this work.

So many nurses overlook the precious nature of what it is that they are actually doing in these people's lives.  No one wants to be ill or hospitalized, even under the best of circumstances, such as for childbirth.  The hospital is a hostile, foreign environment with harried people who make patient's feel as if they are the least important entities around, instead of being made to feel that they are the entire reason for the existence of the hospital machine.  Patients should be at the top of everyone's priority list, before anything else that could matter in the day of the medical provider.  Instead, they are usually placed somewhere near the bottom, right after bathroom breaks and malfunctioning computer programs.  And believe me, they feel this.

I try to compensate for the way health care has become by doing small things that really matter for my patients at every available opportunity.  Whether this is cleaning and moisturizing the mouths and lips of my unconscious patients every hour so they never have to experience that dry, awful sensation that occurs when one is unable to moisten one's own mouth regularly in a normal manner, or taking the additional few moments necessary to really ensure that each patient understands everything about procedures that are about to be done to them before I begin, allowing time for all of their questions, even if it is a simple IV start or catheter placement.  In the world of the patient, these are not normal things.  All to often health workers walk in to the room and without so much as a "Hi, how ya doing?", start inserting painful devices into people's bodily orifices and expect the person to sit there quietly and take this treatment!  In my opinion, this is more than a little barbaric.

With the relatively decent pay rate relative to the amount of education required to participate in this field, it makes sense that is being infiltrated more and more by less-than-ethical individuals.  A lot of people are being drawn to the career for the wrong reasons, namely, money.  I believe that money should never enter the equation when deciding if one wants to make it their profession to care for others.  The impetus should come from somewhere other than wanting a bigger bank account or to drive a Hummer, otherwise it's all too easy to make the wrong choices in how the care of people is executed.  I remember that I went through nearly my entire nursing program over ten years ago before I somehow discovered what kind of a living I would be making as an RN.  I remember not caring much either way when I did find out, other than being happy that I would soon be able to buy a television for my room, something I had been resigned to living without through college while sharing a house with three other girls.  Then again, I was single, and young, and didn't really have much of a grasp of the world of finance in general, not that I have much more of one now, sadly.  But I digress...

The idea is that it is really cool to be able to help others.  It is very important and heady work we are all doing, and I find it so nice when I can take a break from the pressures of my daily life and just recognize this, if only silently, and to myself.   I hope that most nurses also grasp the importance of all that we give, and that it can be measured so much more accurately by the way it feels in the heart at the end of a productive, satisfying day, than how it feels to cash a paycheck with a lot of zero's on it.