Dear Senator Walsh,
While I, like so many others, am offended by your words, I can only assume they come from complete ignorance on what it is that nurses do. Nursing is more than a job or a career. To those of us that have chosen this profession, it is a calling. We spend time away from our families on weekends, holidays, and special occasions. We’ve missed birthdays and anniversaries.
The game that we “play” doesn’t involve cards and the ultimate opponent is Death. We work tirelessly as a team often forgoing lunches, bathroom breaks, and at times, putting our own health at risk for any patient that comes through the door that needs care. We are the best advocates for our patients even while the system continually tries to break us down. A system where I, like so many of my coworkers, have been assaulted, yelled at, demeaned, and abused but continue to give 100% of ourselves to make a difference in the lives of others.
If there is “break time”, it consists of the 5 minutes that we might get to eat a granola bar or actually take a bathroom break before our own bladder explodes.
On our days off, we are often found continuing our education through conferences, meetings, research, and earning advanced degrees to improve care for our patients.
We each have at least one patient, one story that stays with us that we carry in our hearts. Most of us have too many stories to count that change us, mold us, and that bring us to tears even years later. PTSD and moral fatigue are part of nursing that no one warned us about.
I have held the hand of a woman delivering her baby that we knew wasn’t surviving while the mother next door is getting to take her healthy infant home. I have stopped for 5 seconds in the middle of the busy operating room on Christmas Day to pray for guidance and strength to get me through and help the team I was part of try and save, not one but two, lives at the same time when the pregnant mother was in a traumatic car accident.
I have had mothers and fathers beg us to save the life of their child and I have picked those same mothers and fathers up from the emergency room floor to console them when we have been unable to do so.
I have clocked out from my 12+ hour shift with no break and sat at the bedside of my pediatric patient, knowing that I wouldn’t sleep at home and there is no one else to stay with them. I have known coworkers to do the same because this isn’t just a job to us; it is done with all heart.
I have held hands with complete strangers while they have taken their last breath on this earth so they wouldn’t be alone.
I have choked back tears more times than I can count simply because I can’t break down while at work. There are others that need my help more and my emotions can’t get in the way. My tears come when, in the safety of my own vehicle or home, I can silently grieve knowing my patients, their families, and my coworkers need me to be rock solid in my abilities as a nurse. My scrubs have been covered in blood, feces, urine, and other body fluids after my shift and I still love this job.
I have prayed, begged, borrowed, and offered to trade my own soul to save a life and I’ve done so more than once.
There have been times I have questioned my abilities to handle the stress of this job but each day, I get up, put on my scrubs and prepare for the day not knowing what it will entail. Nursing is a part of me; it is who I am. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So to you Senator Walsh, before you assume that we “probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day”, come do this job for a single shift. You wouldn’t last 12 minutes, let alone 12 hours in this job, this profession, this calling. If at any point in your life that your health fails again, it will be nurses that are by your side 24 hours a day, 7 days a week providing quality care with compassion, kindness, and understanding.
The definition of apology is “an admission of error or discourtesy accompanied by an expression of regret”. I believe that you do regret what you said Senator but simply due to the consequences that have occurred. “I was tired” and “it was taken out of context” are both excuses, not apologies. Your “apology” is simply backpedaling after realizing that you’ve become a political disgrace and a social outcast.
And honestly, I don’t want or need your apology.
The only thing I feel for you is sympathy. Sympathy that you will never know what an honor it is to be part of complete strangers lives and make a difference. As nurses, most of us have had the privilege to be there for the beginning of life and at the end. This is what it means to be a nurse.
