Thank you to all the nurses that took care of my preemie baby that just turned two!
It took me over an hour to get home from work the other day. There was an accident on the freeway, and as the clock in my dashboard ticked closer to 8:00 p.m., I knew that I would not make it home in time to put my kids to bed. I had left for work before they had woken up, and I had tried really hard to get home in time to bathe them and tuck them into bed. But a combination of a stressful shift and a fender-bender on I-10 left me stuck alone in my car, helplessly parked on the highway halfway home. I was starving, and I really needed to go to the bathroom. Hormonal, exhausted, and so frustrated I was not going to get to tell my kids goodnight for the third night in a row, I started crying. It was just one of those days.
When I finally walked into my house, my kids were in bed and I was too tired to eat. I aimlessly scrolled through my phone to see nurse after nurse posting Facebook pictures of themselves with their stethoscopes. Curious, I tried to figure out what had initiated such a reaction. After very little investigating, I realized that all the uproar was about something said on a television show by a group of women... and I couldn't really care less.
- My first reaction was that everything said about nurses on this television show was just dumb. I don't even think it could be considered ignorant, I just thought it was stupid.
AWHONN nurses In Washington, D.C. advocating for NAS legislation for our moms and babies!
What most people out there don't understand about nurses is that everything we do, everything we say, every action at and outside of work is examined. Our characters are constantly scrutinized. We aren't able to take off our scrubs and stop being a nurse. And more often than not, we come home exhausted, with some body part injured from work, but tomorrow we will put our scrubs back on and happily serve our patients and our profession.