A short time ago my niece phoned to tell me she was changing her course. She was at University and was already two years into the Nursing Degree program. Her mother, and her three aunts, one of them myself, were, and are, all nurses. Her Mother is a Labrador nurse. I asked my young niece what made her change direction.
“Well, Nursing is not a job, Nursing is a lifestyle. It is a lifestyle I have decided I do not want, so I am changing now. I don’t know how you all withstood careers as nurses!”, was her reply
So she has changed directions, a Nursing career is not in her future, and she knows what she wants. It caused me to reflect on my life and career. I never felt that my work was a job, but in retrospect my nieces’ words ‘nursing is a lifestyle’ are probably very true, at least for my generation. I knew what I wanted, but this young lady is having trouble deciding what to do. I am sure she will find her niche, as I found mine.
In October 1966, my parents drove me to the Grace Hospital Nurses Residence in St. John’s, NL, to begin three years of nurses’ training. I loved it and I never looked back. I had waited so long for this day. I was not quite eighteen years old, full of vim and vigour, and I wanted to get started on achieving my goal of becoming a Nurse.
In October of 1969 that dream became a reality as I walked away from the Grace General Hospital with the initials ‘RN’ after my name. Little did I know that the major part of the learning process was just beginning. That learning process continued to a day in June 2000, in a rural Nova Scotia hospital where I had worked for so long, and where I had made the biggest decision of my adult life; to set Nursing aside and pursue other interests and dreams and to move back to Newfoundland and Labrador. At the age of fifty-one a new stage of my life was about to begin.
At the same time I could not leave Nova Scotia until I had registered as a nurse in Newfoundland again. Obviously a second thought and a nagging doubt was bothering me. It was so very hard to let go, so hard to walk away, but I knew in my heart that it was time. As my mentor and friend used to tell me “the hardest thing in life is knowing when to quit ”-and oh how right she was.
My desire to be a nurse went back to childhood days, and it never occurred to me to do anything else, to have any other career. Nursing was my dream, and that was that
After graduation from the Grace I worked in Grand Bank, NL, for three months in 1969. Then I returned to the Grace General Hospital. To be in St. John’s made it easier to prepare for my wedding. In April 1970 I married a member of the RCMP. At that time members of the force were not permitted to be stationed in their home province. So we left a week after our wedding to set up housekeeping in Nova Scotia where we lived, worked, raised our family, and made lifelong friends over the next 34 years. We have fond memories of Nova Scotia, but the year 2000 was a time to reassess our lives, and we realized it was time to come home. Our son and daughter had been well educated and were living in the Canadian West.
In Nova Scotia I worked in Sydney Mines, North Sydney, Lunenburg, Halifax and Windsor. The major part of my life in Nova Scotia was spent in Windsor, gateway to the magnificent Annapolis Valley. I worked at Hants Community Hospital in Windsor, NS, for many years.
I have often been asked what it takes to be a nurse. My first reaction is to say “sheer grit and determination, a good strong back, and the ability to suffer the human condition, as you will confront both the good and the bad sides of people.
But a nurse also needs the ability and strength of mind and body to be able to cut down a teenager who has hung herself, and deal with the gut-wrenching heartache when she finds the child who has decided to die is a baby she delivered sixteen years before. It takes the fortitude to tell a woman in labor that her baby is dead, and it takes the dedication to stand in the Operating Room in the middle of the night for an emergency and see a young mans tuxedo lying in pieces on the floor with blood seeping into it, as the surgeon works frantically to save his life, knowing his life will never be the same after this accident that brought him to us.
Nursing also has its’ rewards, and I would not change the career I chose but there is much more to it than meets the eye. Mathematics, physics, psychology, and good old-fashioned stamina and common sense are total necessities. The sadness of a grieving family is often offset by the birth of a beautiful, healthy newborn, the smile of the stroke patient as he does something by himself for the first time, the young diabetic who has mastered self-injection and is so proud, and so many more positive happenings enable the sadness to be absorbed and allows the nurse to continue on. Nursing is an art if done well, and a gift as well.
Retiring was a word that was difficult to say for a long time. I could not believe I did not have a Nursing job, but I was finding the system chaotic, I was fifty-one years old, I found the workloads extremely heavy, and the hours long. I knew that in order to do other things I would have to forge ahead into uncharted territory and begin anew. I was amazed to find that there is life outside of the hospitals and Nursing. I also discovered that once you are a ‘Nurse’, you are always a ‘Nurse’.
I had a wonderful fulfilling career, with all the ups and downs that go with working with people who are experiencing great highs and awful lows in their lives, but there is and was fun and laughter, teamwork, friendships that will last forever, and self satisfaction that I did my best, as I am sure most, if not all nurses do. I was always known as the ‘Newfoundland Nurse’ while working in Nova Scotia, and it was a pleasure. I wanted to be the Newfoundlander who showed others how we can laugh at ourselves in spite of it all.
And in spite of it all, a few days ago a cashier at a grocery store asked me as I turned to go if I was a ‘Grace Hospital Nurse’. She had noticed my graduation ring.
“Yes,” I said as I looked at my ring, “I AM A NURSE ”
