This is a topic I can find myself to be very long winded about...most days. As of late, I've found it to be increasingly important to remind myself of the things I love about this profession... My profession. While pondering this topic, I've have come to the realization that many of the things I love about nursing often also present the greatest challenges! However, my goal for now is to focus on the positive aspects...the negative seems overwhelmingly obvious in our current state of existence.
So to begin, I will just say how much I love the opportunity nursing creates to apply critical thinking skills. (Please note, I'm not listing the things I love in order of most importance to me.) Every day presents something new as a nurse, regardless of where you work, but especially in the emergency setting. It reminds me of the famous line from Forest Gump: "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get." That concept is something that has kept nursing appealing and exciting to me over the years.
I remember telling my nursing student classmates that one of the things that intrigued me the most about nursing was the seemingly endless potential opportunities you may have as a nurse. If you get tired or burned out doing one thing, there are so many other possibilities to explore!!! There's surgery, med/surg, ICU, home health, labor and delivery, hospice, oncology, neurology, clinic work, flight nursing, case management, long term care, nursing education, advanced practice nursing... The list goes on! Not to mention all the various shift and schedule options, usually for fairly reasonable compensation!
The ED has presented enough of a challenge to me over the years that I haven't explored beyond that realm very often. However, I'm so grateful I could easily find employment outside that setting the times life has demanded a change for one reason or the other! I've worked in the clinic setting twice during my 3 total pregnancies now which has been a total "God send!" I've been having a few medical complications this pregnancy which has made the flexibility the clinic setting has been able to provide a major blessing.
Serving and helping people was my biggest draw to the nursing world. I had someone ask me once, "If you just wanted to help people, why didn't you become a flight attendant or something?"
I suppose that's a valid question... One of which I have an reasonable explanation for. Nursing provides an opportunity to serve people, but not just that, it provides the privilege of meeting and serving people in some of the most vulnerable and scary/troubling moments or seasons of their lives. This is the greatest reward I've found yet!
This is the thing that gets me up in the morning to keep doing what I do. The beautiful thing I have discovered is that I can apply myself outside of the emergency setting in just as meaningful of a way, even if I'm not faced with life or death situations as often! For me, working in the ER felt very hard to compete with or compare to when it came to feeling like I make a difference.
The thing I've come to realize more clearly is that whether I'm supporting a mom through her infant's first immunizations or consoling and attempting to comfort a mom whose 6 month old we weren't able to revive after being found not breathing in the night, the role the nurse plays for the patient and their family/loved ones is invaluable.
I'm sure I can come up with much more, but for now, I loved to hear... What do you love about nursing?
I never loved it. I did it because I knew that from time to time I would be saving or providing future opportunities to another human. It wasn't something to love, it was a talent I had that benefited others, an ability to look at the human body like it was a machine that only so many things can kill in the short term, and be able to deal with those things. I can point to successes along the way. Some of them are still alive and have no idea who I am or what I did, and that's just fine. And there were failures. More successes than failures, I'm glad to say. But in the civilian sector I…