Learning to Care as a Nurse

Being a nurse, in its definition, is to be a caring individual. In nursing school we are taught that caring is a fundamental role of being a nurse. We learn all about the great nurses in history—Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton and Mary Breckinridge, to name a few—who show us exactly what it means to care. But what happens when we stop caring? How do we get it back?

I was recently speaking with a friend and colleague who started working in the Intensive Care Unit. She explained how guilty she felt that there were some patients that she honestly had a difficult time caring for. Some of these people included drunk drivers, suicide attempts, and convicts. She said that it was hard to care for a patient who did not care for themselves when there were people struggling for their lives who were good and honest people. My friend is an amazing nurse, and of course provides great care to all of her patients, but I appreciated hearing her honesty. What do we do in these situations when we simply lose that ability to care?

In nursing school I have seen this happen to a lot of students. It seems to especially happen when students start going to clinicals and taking care of real patients. Sometimes the reality of who our patients are does not coincide with the image we have of them in our heads. Prior to working with patients it’s easy to imagine that they will all be grateful, sweet, and overly appreciative of everything we do, but the reality can be very different. Obviously there are those nice patients, but sometimes it feels like there are more unappreciative and demanding patients out there waiting to make us feel more like waiters than nurses. How do we care for these patients?

I wish I had the answer to these questions, but honestly – we do care. Nurses become nurses because they are caring individuals to begin with. Even when you have a weak moment at work and feel as though you can’t possibly care for your patient – you do. Something inside of a nurse’s heart makes it possible to go into work every day and provide that amazing care that makes a nurse different than every other medical professional. It is what we do and no amount of bad days or difficult patients will ever take that away from us. We’re in it to care.