the making of a nurse

I start my first day of preceptorship tomorrow. I don't know why I am so nervous, I guess I haven't been using any of my practical nursing skills in awhile.

I don't know if any of you nurses or soon-to-be nurses have heard about the author Tilda Shalof. She is a Canadian author and nurse with a background in Intensive Care. I have read A Nurse's Story and the Making of a Nurse, and I think for anyone who is not in the nursing profession, she provides an interesting insiders view about what it is like to work in healthcare. But I think anybody studying nursing would benefit most from reading her books. She talks about all of her crazy experiences working in the ICU and paints an interesting picture of the good aspects and challenges of working as a nurse.

Here are some of my favourite quotes from the book The Making of a Nurse.

"Why had so much changed? Health care is expensive and stretched to the limit, new technologies are available but human needs are still the same. Perhaps in our infatuation with technology, we have strayed too far from ensuring that people's most fundamental requirements are met: food, clean water, hygiene, relief, comfort, education, solace, safeguarding, monitoring, rescuing, kindness, human touch, and beauty - all within the domain of nursing. Whether it's cardiac nursing or pediatrics, public health or camp nursing, it comes down to these things".

"I no longer differentiate between the person I am and the nurse I've become. Nursing is my profession and my way of life. It is a deep and abiding concern for the human condition. We are all nurses - or have the capacity to be - and we are all patients - or have the potential to be. I owe nursing a lot. It saved my life many times. Through the discipline of taking care of patients, I learned how to take care of myself. By finding compassion for my own suffering, I developed more compassion for others. Nursing showed me how to be joyful despite my own sadness. It has given me awareness of the world's suffering and the skills and knowledge to do something toward its alleviation. It has taught me how to love things I never thought I could love".

"I often wonder: Who would want ot be a nurse, especially if they knew what it really entails? Who chooses nursing these days and why? I ask these questions honestly and open-mindedly, not rhetorically or cynically. Nursing is not a career you can advise or persuade someone ot choose and it is a hard path to champion if you have not perosnally experienced its many satisfactions. I'm quite sure that the vast majority choose it because of a genuine desire to help others, but one nursing student told me nursing attractied him because "the salary is decent and it's steady work." Another told me she really wanted medicine, but didn't get in and nursing was her fallback. I'm afraid these motivations aren't going to cut it when those nurses enter a patient's room and are faced with raw human suffering. Nursing is dirty, gritty, messy, grinding, brutal, rough, and heartbreaking. It is also inspiring, sophisticated, challenging, fun, comforting, and at times exhilirating".

I really admire Tilda Shalof because she is passionate about bedside nursing - which is more or less viewed as a stepping stone on the way towards an administrative position for lots of new nursing graduates. I can't imagine I'd enjoy a position sitting in a beige office somewhere, performing tasks that are mostly unrelated to everything I've learned in school, when there is so much to learn and so much opportunity to grow by directly taking care of patients.

And so it is, just like you said it would be.

I worked a twelve hour shift the night before last at a nursing home. The money is great, but the work is exhausting. Extremely physical. I work as a Patient Care Attendant, and I assist mostly LPN's. This job really makes you appreciate the work of LPN's. I know there is a stereotypical power struggle between nurses and physicians, where nurses have traditionally assumed a subservient role assisting doctors. I think this relationship very much also exists (and maybe more so) with LPN's and RN's. I know when LPN's in Canada expanded their scope of practice, most notably with giving medications, nurses kicked up a big fuss. Yet, nurses expected physicians to be supportive when they expanded their scope of practice (for example, when nurse practitioners were allowed to write prescriptions).
My preceptorship is in two weeks! Very nervous! I start on May 13th with two night shifts. I like starting with night shifts because I heard it isn't as busy as during the day, so it would be good to get used to how the floor works. Apparently there are hemovac drains, which we haven't even covered in school, and chest tubes, which we only covered briefly in one skills lab. I hope I learn a lot and it is a good experience! We shall see I guess.
Things are pretty stressful with my boyfriend. He's going away in September, to Osgoode Law School in Toronto which is realllyyyy far away from my home in Newfoundland. I'm hoping to go up and do my independent clinical up there in February, and then eventually move up there when I am graduated. I will be sad to see him go. We are really close, and have been going out for almost six years. I've never been in a long distance realtionship before.