Nurses Do It with Patience

I know what you're thinking: Did he spell that right?

I did. In fact, I emphatically did!

Truth is, to be a nurse requires both patience and patients. To be a good nurse requires a lot more of the former, but a lot of the latter make it more interesting, albeit sometimes more frustrating.

Like most social statuses, a nurse can be defined in a variety of ways and in relation to various other social groups. Nurses are sometimes said to be care givers, healers, physician-lackeys, pill-pushers, even pill-poppers. Sometimes we are therapists, other times janitors, sometimes we are just the people who drunken patients spit on and curse.

Nurses vis-a-vis doctors might be understood differently than nurses vis-a-vis patients or members of the EMS (Emergency Medical System). It depends which side of the nurse you're on.

However you want to define the status, whatever roles you might assume nurses play in patient care, in nursing departments (e.g., ER, ICU, etc.), even in health care organizations and the national system (sic) of health care, there is one ubiquitous element of nursing: the essence is patience.

Nurses wait, and are required to understand the importance of waiting. We wait for doctors to write legible orders, for patients to finally confess their two pack-a-day habit or decide they'd rather have the enema than the pain of severe constipation, for EMTs (emergency medical technicians...those folks on the ambulance) to call in from the field to tell us how many patients we can expect from the head-on on the highway.

If nurses were not required to have patience, health care organizations would be poorer because people wouldn't utilize them; families would be burdened with the care of their own; and many sick people might be horribly misunderstood.

Odd that nurses need to have so much patience but doctors are not expected to have much of it. Compared to what nurses do, for doctors, health care is like McCare, WalMend. Patients want quick and easy diagnoses, quick procedures, and quick scripts. Doctors want to be in and out of patient rooms. Doctors, by and large, get paid by the patient--piece work. Nurses generally receive a salary or hourly wages. For nurses, patience pays off in ways it doesn't for physicians.

So, next time you see one of those bumper stickers "(blank) Do It with (blank)," remember where the nurses go, and that its patience, not patients.