What’s it like to be a nurse?
It’s a fair question, and one I’ve been asked a time or two. Sometimes people think they know. After all, you’ve seen nurses congregated at the nursing station, laughing, talking on the phone, feet propped up on a chair. Must be a pretty relaxed job, huh?
Or some folks think about the cheddar. They figure with the big bucks nurses bring home from typing on the computer and checking temperatures it must be the best gig around.
Or perhaps they watch a lot of TV, fun shows like Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy. Maybe they think it’s a bunch of pranks on the new guy and flirting with cute doctors.
Maybe.
But maybe it’s like this.
Maybe as a nurse when you get a new patient you realize that you have no clue. I mean, you get report and stuff. You look at labs and X-rays. You know from clinical experience and years of knowledge sort of what to assume will come through the door, but you also understand that you can never really know.
Sometimes your patient may be stable, and that’s really great. But more often than not they aren’t. More often than not they’re confused, and even as you beg, “please don’t pull that tube out of your nose,” they do.
Maybe being a nurse means you live in this uncertain environment, and even though you’re taught how to respond when stuff goes down, when it happens, your heart still races.
Perhaps being a nurse means expecting the unexpected, because that’s nursing, but still feeling helpless when your patient goes into respiratory distress while you’re both in the elevator. And as you rush down the hall, pulling a heavy bed with your five month pregnant self, you pray, “please, just make it to the room!”
It seems like being a nurse means thinking quickly while you watch numbers on the monitor screen plummet to ones incompatible with life, and even as you silently wish them to go back up, they do not.
Maybe nursing is fighting, and then fighting some more. I guess it’s being in a packed room with a group of your professional peers while quick, curt instructions are pounded out. It’s trying to intervene, to do your part, to remember everything you know, and to keep your hands from shaking despite your adrenaline pumping double-time.
It seems that nursing may end up being a continuous adrenal rush to keep going, to keep fighting to save a life. It’s pounding on someone’s chest, making their body jump off the bed with electrical shocks, and administering dangerous medications, all while watching that darn screen and willing it to show you something good.
Maybe sometimes nursing is sitting at a desk, but then other times it’s standing at the bedside, going on the third hour of continuous intervention to bring someone back from the brink of death.
It’s reaching your limit emotionally, physically, and mentally, but being unable to stop because the situation at hand won’t allow it. It’s digging deeper into self than you knew possible, forgoing a bathroom or water break. Heck, forgetting you’re even human enough to require such things. It’s reaching that end of your rope, and then magically finding more rope.
Then perhaps nursing is breaking bad news to family, and wishing, just wishing that you had the right words to say. It’s dreaming that you had a magic potion of comfort in your scrub pocket, but as you hold a crying wife on your thin shoulder, realizing you do not. You do not.
Maybe nursing is giving it all you have, and barely being able to tread water at times. It’s fighting and fighting to keep someone alive until your relief arrives.
And then it’s charting the past, chaotic thirteen hours. It’s trying to remember all the important details to document for quality improvement and your own legal protection, but feeling so frazzled and mentally drained that you are certain you’re missing something.
Then perhaps nursing is going home way after your shift should have ended, dragging yourself to your personal car, and then reliving the past six hours on the drive home. It’s mentally berating yourself for not being fast enough, quick-thinking enough, or enough of a miracle worker to prevent the downfall of the person who trusted you to care for them in their hour of need.
It’s knowing you did all you could do, but beating yourself up because you wish you could have done more.
It’s wondering if your patient you fought so hard to keep alive through your shift will make it through the night. And then wondering if you’re up to battle again tomorrow if they do.
It’s knowing you can, and you will, because that’s what it’s like to be a nurse. It’s giving all you have, and then going back to give some more.
Nursing; it’s sore feet, a headache, and an aching back. It’s worrying about someone you don’t even know, and praying comfort for family whose names you have forgotten. It’s going to bed, despite your mental anguish, so you may be rested enough to fight another day. Because that’s what it’s like to be a nurse.
Dyane says
And to add … You can’t really talk about your day/week with others because you’d be violating HIPAA. Mostly you end up saying it was hard (translation: someone died, someone received heartbreaking news, etc) or it was good (translation: the opposite of above).