There are orders, there is screaming, there is pain, there is chaos. For every second of my 12-hour shift, there is something. Having shifts like these, day in and day out, can slowly fog over the rose-colored glasses I wore of the beginning of my nursing career, when I knew I was going to make a difference. After being cursed out, kicked at, spit on and told, “you’re just a nurse,” I sometimes begin to forget why I decided this was my calling. But then, as if the universe knows you’re on your last leg, there is the patient who looks you in the eye and simply says thank you and you know they mean it. That’s when I remember all that I know.
I know that because I chose to be a nurse there will be moments in my career that I will never be able to forget no matter how hard I tried. The wailing of a parent who lost their child, the defeat in the trauma team when we came so close to saving a life, the look of loss that swims in someone’s eye when they realize someone they love is gone, the shock and confusion when someone is handed a diagnosis that will forever change the person they were before walking in to the ED with a simple headache.
I also know that because I choose nursing there will be moments I will always remember. Moments I will cherish and cling to when I feel my faith in this career wavering.
It’s because of these moments that I have been able to hold someone’s hand while they let their loved ones pass into peace, cried with family members because in that moment, I wasn’t just a nurse — I was a person who felt and shared their pain, pulled up a chair to hear a story from an elderly person who just wants someone to listen, stood with a wife trying to explain how we were doing every possible thing in our power to bring back her husband.
In closing, because of this wild, irreplaceable career that has found me just as much as I have found it, I will always choose life, I will always choose love and I will always, every time, choose nursing.
SCRUB NURSE.
NRS EKONG A.
Miss ponyx Hospitals Ltd
