By Samuel W. Carver RN, JD
Humboldt General Hospital
I don't know how many times I have heard, "Why would anybody ever give up a successful 25-year career as a lawyer to become a nurse?" My most frequent and admittedly glib reply is, "Redemption." Typically, this response results in laughter, and the conversation can then move on to less weighty and more pressing matters.
I say "less weighty" because the reasons I abandoned the law to become a nurse were both complex and personal, and the reasons I remain a nurse are even more complex and much more deeply personal.
Let us be honest, all organisms, including humans, engage in purposeful activities for the rewards that result from the activity. The reward may be tangible, such as a paycheck, or it may be intangible, such as a the strong internal satisfaction one has at the end of a shift where the patient struggling to breathe at the beginning of a shift is resting and breathing easily by shift change because of all the efforts and interventions of the nurse, respiratory therapist and physician during the preceding 12 hours.
In nursing, one can indeed have both the tangible as well as the intangible.
Before I learned better from an experienced ICU nurse, I used to think that all nurses did was wipe bottoms and hand out pills. Once those scales were removed from my eyes, the draw of constantly using intellectual and analytical skills to solve immediate and present patient challenges was, for me, as inescapable as a speck of iron in front of an electromagnet. Very few professions provide the opportunity for serious cerebral activity with immediate feedback that nursing does.
Whether we are aware of it or not, nurses in all areas use their minds constantly, and even if recognition from others doesn't come, it doesn't need to, because we know when we have a difference with a capital "D."
Perhaps for me, the strongest attraction of nursing is our role as being the champion of our patients. Every day we, with our patients, battle powerful and often inexorable forces such as pain, disease, old age and death. For the hours we have a patient, their well-being is to a very large degree, in our hands.
We are the ones who constantly assess and reassess our patients' status and needs. We are the persons responsible for bringing all the tools in our arsenals of knowledge and ordered medications into play on our patients' behalf, and of notifying physicians and ancillary staff of changes in patient conditions, or sometimes simply overlooked needs.
Occasionally, we help fend off death until a loved one can arrive, or we do all we can to ensure that the passage into eternity is with a minimum of discomfort and fear. Often we use medications to alleviate pain or cure disease, but that is not all we give to those in pain or distress. Frequently, we give the comfort of a touch or the soft benefit of an attentive and nonjudgmental ear. Even the Super Bowl is not as challenging or exhilarating as many of the daily challenges with powerful opponents that nurses face.
Finally, in nursing nothing we do is unimportant. This was imprinted on me early in my ICU career when I arrived early before a shift change and noticed a newly arrived patient in obvious emotional distress. Because all of the staff was busy dealing with a near code situation, I went into the patient's room and asked if I could help. She asked for water (which was permitted) and I delivered it to her and chatted with her for several minutes about country music until she seemed to be at ease.
I thought nothing of the incident until several weeks later when the woman came to the unit and brought me Patsy Cline tapes she had recorded from her personal record collection. Inasmuch as she had never been my patient, I was a bit nonplused when she said, "This is for saving my life. When I was lying in that bed, I had almost completely given up hope until you brought me that one glass of water. That made all the difference to me." Of course, the water made no difference to the medical outcome in her case, but it made a world of difference to that patient at that time.
Yes, I'll stay in nursing. You can't find such heady rewards anywhere else.
Samuel W. Carver is a nurse at Humboldt General Hospital. Before his time in nursing, he enjoyed a 25-year career as a lawyer.
[[In-content Ad]]
