Just a nurse

The age old question that every nurse is asked a minimum of a million times over their careers. Family members, friends, patients, doctors, other nurses; they all seem to eventually wonder why you are ‘just a nurse.’ The pay is better as a doctor, the respect is higher, the comforts of life come more easily and it’s a rarity to get doused in bodily fluids or excrement. Believe me, there are countless times that a nurse would think that being a doctor would be so much better than this (there are also times when a nurse thinks that working at a fast food joint for the rest of their life would be better).

A few examples: When you are sticking a catheter into someone’s pee hole, when a psychiatric patient punches you so hard in the shoulder that you bruise for the next three weeks, when a patient projectile vomits all over you, or when a patient intentionally takes their colostomy bag and proceeds to squirt literal shit all over your shoes. Those are the moments where one may wonder, “Why in the world did I CHOOSE, actually consciously decide that this was the career for me?”

Trust me; being a doctor would be SO much better.

One morning at about 0137 I helped my 78-year old patient onto the commode. I sat in the room waiting for her to complete her business and she started to talk. Twenty minutes later she was no closer to relieving herself but I knew the whole story of how she met her husband, how they consummated their marriage (a story I could have gone the rest of eternity without knowing) and all of the names of her grandchildren. Finally, she looked at me as I sat there bobble heading and smiling to show my feigned interest in her stories and she said, “Why aren’t you a doctor?”

Maybe it was the fact that it was my sixth twelve hour shift in a row, or maybe it was the fact that it was two in the morning and that seems to be when honesty peaks; it could even have been a spiritual moment, but what came out of my mouth next was the most honest answer I have ever given,“I’m not a doctor, because if I was I wouldn’t have an opportunity to know everything you just told me. I’m not a doctor because working in health care should never be about the paycheck you get. I’m not a doctor because I want to know my patients as more than a list of symptoms or a H&P. I’m not a doctor because when I was 19 years old working through my pre-med courses, I sat with my ill brother in a hospital room and I heard God tell me to be a nurse.”

Nursing is not a lucrative career. Nursing is not always kind to the body, mind, emotions or soul. It is nearly never sexy, nor is it ever easy. But nursing is a career where you can be brutally honest and you can be the hands, feet and words of Jesus. I have sat with a 20-something who suffered a heart attack due to his cocaine addiction and brushed away tears as he yet again made a commitment to change his life for the sake of his newborn son. I have embraced a grieving mother and mingled my tears with hers as she said an untimely and forever farewell to her teenage daughter. I have held the hand of a terrified elderly man and prayed as he stepped from this life to the next. I have laughed until I cried and cried until I had to laugh. I have come home more days than not with unidentified stains on my scrubs and the weight of carrying human lives on my shoulders for a day.

So, why am I not a doctor? Because I feel that my scope of changing lives and touching hearts is so much greater by being “just a nurse.” Being “just a nurse” is gross, exhausting, frustrating and something inexplicably sad. But being a nursing is exciting, rewarding, challenging and indescribably humbling. Being a nurse is worth it.