The Truth About Nursing

So it would be a lie if I told you I were completely acclimated with my job. Sometimes, I wonder how one human being is even capable of processing and enduring so much sensory stimulation in a period of 12 hours, but ICU nurses somehow manage to do it. I think about all of the things I do at my job and not one fleeting moment of thought resembles the last. That's just it, my job is so unusually weird (for lack of a better word), that my thoughts can't even begin to sound like a broken record.

In the utopia of nursing, my job would be ideal, probably even my dream job, if I could go to work and simply engage in the act of nursing. I mean truly engage in the basics of nursing. While there is nothing basic about it, I would love to just care for a patient, in every sense of the word, with every meaning attached to the act. From the bed bath, to the pulmonary artery catheters to the straw-sized foreign cylinders that are millimeters away from causing a person to exsanguinate to death, all of it is incredible. However, what gets me down so to speak, are the non-nursing buggers of my job. The dealing with, the tolerating, the mediating, the overcoming vast oceans of miscommunication..the list goes on...these are the things that make me at times abhor it.

People often ask me what I do as a nurse. And I find myself reticent. If only I could take those people on a journey through my mind and eyes. If only they could see those 12 hours of my life, they might begin to understand, if so inclined. But because I'm left with my words, sometimes so empty and meaningless, I can't get the truth across. You can only explain. Maybe that is the beauty of nursing, it is something so unimaginable, so unique, that words do it no justice.