Nursing Tribute: Why Is It So Difficult? ......

This article is dedicated to those nurses around the world working in the trenches; working tirelessly for the good of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones who are entrusted to your tender, loving and skillful care.
Why is it so difficult... this being a nurse? I mean, in what other profession do you:

• Make life-and-death decisions for 7 people based on a 5-minute shift report?
   
• Get get berated by a physician for forgetting one thing when you have remembered 100 other things?  
• Think about what you are going to have for lunch while cleaning an emesis basis or a bedpan?
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• Have to know the etiology, classification, dosage, side effects, contraindications, and compatibility for 18,000 different medications?
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• Need to know the significance of obscure lab results and whether the doctor should be awakened at 3am because of them?
   
• Have to obtain a physician's order to give a patient a Tylenol but have the authority to float a Swan-Ganz catheter through a patient's heart to measure central venous pressure and pulmonary artery pressure?
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• Coordinate respiratory therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, radiology, dietary, social services, consulting specialists, and wound care nurses for 7 patients but somehow forget where you put your car keys?
   
• Spend 12 hours on your feet only to be told by your personal physician that you need to get more excercise
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• Own 20 sets of scrubs and own zero sets of scrubs without a stain on them?
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• Have to learn a new corporate computer system when you are 55 years old, and you don't even own a computer?
   
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• Find yourself choosing a personal physician based on how nice he or she is to the nurses?
   
• Go to work when it's still dark outside and leave work when it is again dark outside?
   
• Get floated to some random area of the hospital where you have received zero training and be expected to carry the load of a nurse who has worked the unit for 20 years?
   
• Consider a chair at the nurses station as something worth fighting for?
   
• Learn about research findings because the administration taped them on the wall of the ladies' room across from the toilet?
  
• Know your patients by their diagnoses and/or their room numbers rather than their names?
   
• Feel naked without a stethoscope and a pen hanging around your neck?
   
• Learn how to take a manual blood pressure in 15 seconds flat?
   
• Remember your worst nightmare was when you dreamt that the doctor called and you couldn't find the patient's chart?
   
• Feel guilty when you leave your patients for 30 minutes to have lunch?
   
• Learn to read physicians' handwriting that resembles the graffiti on the dumpster behind the local Wal-Mart?

Why is it so difficult? And why is it so difficult imagining myself ever doing anything else? And why is it so difficult to explain why I love it so much...this being a nurse?






About the Author: Susan Kieffer, RN, MSN/Ed., is a fulltime faculty member with the Kaplan University School of Nursing online.  Her current position involves orienting and training new faculty members in their transition to online education.  She is a busy pastor’s wife, worship leader, a mother of two, a grandmother of six, and pet owner of a Great Dane, Pomeranian, a Himalayan cat, a snake, and other multiple critters.  She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in E-Commerce.

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