I Went Into Nursing For This?

Well...

Maybe this blog will turn into a "book review" site of sorts it seems. Or maybe I'm just seeking to find validation as to why I chose nursing as a profession so many years ago.

I recently read this book, "A Nurse's Story" by Tilda Shalof and was really impacted by some of her stories. I hope she doesn't mind that I share a bit of one chapter here that articulates what I've always tried to convey to friends and family but just couldn't seem to find the words - whereas she did!

In school, they'd taught us how important it was to offer empathy to our patients. Sympathy was wishy-washy, sentimental. Empathy was the ability to perceive and feel another's pain. One was supposed to share the patient's "lived experience of illness." One was supposed to get inside the patient, see things from the patient and family's point of view, think and feel like the patient, take on what that person was experiencing. All of this was in order to know them intimately and only by knowing them in this way could the nurse give the greatest gift: empathy, the hallmark of the professional nurse.

What profession other than nursing was defined by this degree of emotional involvement? Even social workers could keep their distance with words and paperwork. Teachers could choose to get involved in students' personal problems, listen, empathize, and draw them out, but they could also choose not to do so and stick to their subject matter and still be excellent teachers.

However, a nurse who was not sensitive to a patient's emotions, who did not help to assuage bad feelings, who did not offer the ultimate gift of feeling for them - empathy - was simply not meeting a basic requirement of the job.

Did those who taught us ever realize what a demand it was on young (mostly) women (by far the vast majority of nurses) whose boundaries were often so permeable and pliable? Had anyone ever considered the toll such emotional receptiveness took on most of us, both male and female? Why wasn't it covered in the lectures and textbooks of nursing - how one could stay sensitive to the patient's experience, see things from their point of view, be compassionate, and still manage not to get pulled down with them into despair and sadness, or be affected by their anger and frustration? Otherwise, who could do this work effectively for any length of time? Who could sustain it into a lifelong career?

There were many times when we felt empty, bereft, overwhelmed by the demands - the emotional ones much more than the physical ones - of being nurses. Sometimes it seemed that the work asked too much of us, not only as nurses, but also as human beings. Who can give so much, so selflessly? In order to do this work you had to be selfless, because to do it properly, you had to become without a self. You might have a self, but you had to subordinate it, obliterate it at times, in order to meet other people's needs.

We were not supposed to have our own needs. Yes, we were tired and hungry, but who cared? Certainly not the patients, who were mostly unconscious and totally dependent on us. Definitely not the families, who expected complete devotion from us and seemed to resent it when we took a break or even when we got up to leave at the end of a twelve-hour shift and they had to become accustomed to the style and idiosyncrasies of a new nurse.