I believe in the Catholic faith. I chose it on my own as a 15 year old because for the first time in my life I found home. I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I love everything about my faith and I want to be Jesus to each person I meet.
The other thing I am passionate about is nursing. If you've had a conversation with me, chances are nursing came up and my face lit up and I got really excited to tell you all about what I was learning or my patient that week.. or something.
I picked nursing because I knew for as long as I can remember that I wanted to spend my life helping people. I knew I wanted to care for people and to love people. I knew there was a lot of brokenness in this world and I knew that love, care, and compassion were the cure - so I wanted to spend my life doing these things. To me, nursing is more than a career path - it's a vocation, a calling.
So you can only imagine my reaction to The View this week and the commentary on Miss Colorado's monologue, which brought tears to my eyes.
At first, I was enraged. How could someone be so ignorant, rude, disrespectful, and degrading?!
But maybe she's never had a loved one in the hospital. Maybe she has never known a nurse personally. Maybe she has been hurt by someone who was a nurse... I don't know. I hope that she some day realizes how inappropriate her commentary was - and how it enraged, but more than that, wounded nurses everywhere. Her commentary cut to the heart of nurses. But I'll forgive her...
There aren't adequate words to put to our experiences as nurses. I've cared for women from different cultures, where women don't have a voice, and her husband spoke for her. I've cared for patients who were actively dying. I've cared for patients who got highly confused and I was able to calm them down because they recognized my face from earlier in the day, and they thanked me for caring for them all day. I've had patients give me a hug their last day in the hospital and promise to change their lives. I've cared for patients who couldn't remember how to give themselves a bath. I've seen the difference a listening ear can make in a patient's progress towards healing.
Yesterday one of my nursing friends had to do chest compressions on a real person(not the dummies we learn CPR on) for the first time and all she kept saying was how she could feel the ribs breaking. They tried for 45 mins to save this patient and did everything they could. And it was obvious this girl was affected, just as any compassionate human being would have been - especially for the first time.
I've had patients who wouldn't let go of my hand. I've stayed in procedure rooms where I normally would have left because the patient only stayed calm if I was present.
The lady on The View made comments about our "doctors" stethoscope and about our scrubs being a "costume" but I think what kills me the most is overlooking the care and compassion nurses have to their patients. What kills me most is not that she doesn't realized medical professionals everywhere use stethoscopes and that scrubs are the practical attire for a nurse, but that these women overlooked the whole point of the monologue in the first place - to remind herself and nurses everywhere that we are more than just a nurse and to try to teach this world that nurses do far more and care far more than anyone who has not spent time in a hospital realizes.
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