Nurse’s Week: Beyond the Job Description

I will never forget my first few shifts on my unit as a hem/onc nurse—though at the time, the title only felt official because of an exam I had passed a few months earlier. Everything else still felt impossibly far away. I watched seasoned nurses move in and out of patient rooms with a kind of quiet confidence I couldn’t comprehend yet: dropping NG tubes into tiny noses, accessing ports on the first try, catching subtle changes before anyone else noticed them, advocating fiercely to physicians, and doing everything in their power to ease a child’s pain. Somehow, they managed to do all of it while appearing calm, compassionate, and completely steady.

After every one of those early shifts, one thing stood true in my mind: these nurses are literal heroes. And every time, I would think: I want to be just like them.

It takes an extraordinary amount to be a great nurse. For my non-medical friends, let me try to explain it. Nurses are expected to think critically at all times, catching signs of deterioration early because we are the ones at the bedside for twelve straight hours. Sometimes you are both nurse and parent at the same moment—bathing a child, brushing their teeth, helping them feel human again in the middle of something terrifying. Other times, you absorb the anger and fear that a child or parent cannot place anywhere else. You become a safe place for emotions that have nowhere to go.

Meanwhile, the shift keeps moving. There are medications to give, labs to collect, charting to finish, calls to return. Right in the middle of it all, your sweet patient projectile vomits across the floor. CT is on the phone asking why your other patient isn’t in room 3 yet. You still have not texted physical therapy back about a good time to stop by. And somewhere in between trying to keep everyone stable, comfortable, and reassured, you realize you have not eaten or gone to the bathroom in hours.

And yet—

You walk into the room of a child with terminal cancer because an alarm is beeping at 2am, and in the middle of the dark and the exhaustion, you hear them say, “I love you.”

It is the first time you have met, but you say it back even louder.

Suddenly, the tasks and the chaos feel smaller. The exhaustion, the missed lunch break, the ache in your back, the low blood sugar from forgetting to eat for ten hours straight—it all fades into the background for just a moment.

There has to be a word for the feeling of living two lives at once as a nurse: carrying both heartbreak and fulfillment in the very same shift.

“Best of both worlds” doesn’t quite capture it.

When I first started my nursing career, I understood death would be part of the job. But about a month ago, I found myself wide awake at 5:30 am, staring at my scrub drawer, wondering which color would feel the most comforting and appropriate for a family I knew in my gut would lose their child later that morning. 

Like a lot of things in nursing, it’s something I could have never been prepared or trained for. Yet in a way, it felt like everything in my life had led me to that day. To that family. 

You would think after a day like that, I would go straight home to sit with it, to process everything I had just been a part of. Instead, after my shift ended, I went to a surprise party to meet friends who don’t work in healthcare. I think I just craved laughter and an escape from all the darkness. 

But I also sat there battling the idea of being caught in two realities—surrounded by joy while carrying the heaviness of a family’s worst day. Even if the whole room knew of what I had witnessed that day, they wouldn’t have fully understood.

I thought to myself, that’s the strange duality of this job, learning how to exist in both worlds at once.

That was an easier thing to contemplate before that shift, before I held the hand of a lifeless body, in a room full of so much love and spirit, it was equally soul-filling and suffocating. 

This “nurse’s week,” I am celebrating how incredible it is that we get to live in these two worlds, inside and outside the hospital walls. No matter how jarring it is. 

I’ve been lucky in my life. I’ve known love, stability, and support—raised by two loving parents in a beautiful home that supported me down every road I’ve gone down thus far. And because of that, I never want to lose my sensitivity to the darker parts of life I now witness. The day I become numb to it is the day I know I need to step away.

But alongside that darkness is something else—something I didn’t expect. The deepest kind of honor I have ever felt and probably will ever feel. There is nothing that compares to being trusted with someone’s most vulnerable moments. I know my face will likely never be forgotten by the family I sat with that day. And there is something profoundly humbling in knowing I was chosen by God to walk through it all with them.

Nursing is full of experiences that don’t translate easily outside of it. They are deeply personal, often impossible to compare to anything in everyday life. And yet, at the end of a shift, we are expected to clock out, take off our badge, walk out of the hospital, and return to a world that kept moving while ours briefly stood still.

I think a lot about how we do that. 

I play tennis with an impressive woman who is an OB-GYN. She sometimes delivers two to three babies overnight and will still show up later in the morning to play a match. I once asked her how she does it—how she separates herself from her work, how she processes things so quickly, especially when a delivery doesn’t go as planned. 

She told me it gets easier with time.
But she also said she can’t do it forever.

That answer stayed with me, mostly because it felt so honest.

As nurses, we quickly learn that picking up the phone and calling our non-medical moms for support after a hard shift usually ends with them in tears with your recap only a quarter of the way through, lol. I don’t blame mine. Not everyone is meant to carry what we carry.

So we adjust our expectations. We learn that our parents, siblings, and partners may not fully understand these parts of our lives. It’s a hard pill to swallow when it seems they’ve guided you through every other trial you’ve experienced outside of work. But they’re not going to get it the way you want them to. 

And they don’t have to. Because then you look down and see your phone being flooded with messages from your coworkers. The ones who were there, or who have been there and don’t need the full explanation. You realize—that might be the deepest kind of understanding there is. 

Nurse’s week to me speaks to the way we pick each other up when we’re down through solidarity.

Like I said before, the nurses I know truly are heroes. Badasses really. I’m celebrating the ones I work with who I still stand today in awe of. I still want to grow up and be just like them.

But I’m also celebrating nurses all around the world. The ones comforting families through the worst days of their lives at this very moment. The ones grieving with patients they will never forget. The ones sacrificing holidays, sleep, time with their own families, and pieces of themselves in order to care for someone else. And somehow, despite all of it, they continue to walk into work with kindness, humor, and open hearts.

At some point in elementary school, we were asked to write down what we wanted to do when we grew up. I didn’t write down a job title–I wrote: “I want to make a difference in the world.”

Back then, I didn’t know what that would look like or where life would take me. But somewhere along the way, nursing became my way of loving people, showing up for them, and hopefully leaving things a little lighter than I found them. I am so incredibly grateful I get to do that.

Hug a nurse this week!!!!!