From the Author
I was 21 in the Summer of 1972. I had spent my high school years doing the usual: sports, part time work at a drive in restaurant, and spending my spare time with Judy, a girl who worked there with me.
High paying jobs were in very short supply at this time as it was a period of economic recession.
Pro baseball hadn’t panned out as I had spent too much time in high school missing practice, goofing off at practice, and generally showing no respect for the game or my coaches. I had enrolled in college that Fall quarter following high school with no particular goal in mind. That lasted for a few weeks until I walked away from classes one day and never went back. Soon after, Judy and I parted ways.
I soon found myself in San Diego where I entered the exciting world of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. It was the Summer of 1972.
I had no girlfriend, no trade or education, minimum wage jobs were hard to find, and I was broke. I was feeling lonely and worthless. I had filled out lots of applications. I had been hanging around the longshoreman, plumber, and electrician unions all Summer long but had gotten nowhere closer to solid employment.
As I drifted on, I ran into my old flame Judy who was now a year into a nursing program at Tacoma Community College (TCC). Judy thought it would be a perfect fit for me and suggested I enroll in the nursing program, too.
I wondered how nursing could be perfect for me. She said that one of the great benefits of being a nurse is that I could start and stop whenever I wanted because there was actually a shortage of able-bodied nurses. I looked in the paper and sure enough, there were tons of nursing ads that I had never noticed before. The wages were well above minimum so no more just barely getting by.
It would only take two years to complete the program, it was affordable, and Judy gave me her notes and textbooks.
I spent about six weeks asking questions, investigating what it means to be a nurse, and pondering the weirdness of it all. Was this the right path for me?
In a spasm of despair, I decided to go for it even though I still had no idea what I was getting myself into. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d always been interested in the sciences. I could look into this diabetes thing my brother had had since age nine. I’d have job stability.
And so I started. Being only one of two men in the fledgling program, and the other being a Baptist minister with a degree in theology, I felt a little out of place to begin with.
The Talk
And then the talk started. Talk about nurses having a “passion for caring”, being “special”. Being “devoted to caring”, “committed to compassion”.
“Nurses don’t do it for the money” is the number one motto. I already felt “special” being only one to two men in the program, but I began to feel really special because though I cared about people and about my job, I was not a fanatically caring nurse. I was just a normal human.
Was I caring enough to be a nurse, I wondered?
As this repetitive talk of caring, being special, having unselfish concern for the welfare of others continued, I felt as if I should say, “You can do this for the money”, but I didn’t.
For fear of what people would say, for fear of getting kicked out of the program for not caring enough, or what, I do not know. I didn’t say what was on my mind. No big deal I thought.
As time went on I began to feel like some sort of double agent.
I felt like a spy, a pimp in a church, Pinocchio or some other such person who hides his true motives or identity. I was an outsider of sorts.
Yet I didn’t see a good enough reason to come clean and quit the program so I just studied, kept my mouth shut, and graduated.
I have now been in practice for over 40 years as a Registered Nurse. When I first started nursing, I thought I had had done it for the money. Over the years, I realized I cared for people more than I thought. And yet, I have maintained that feeling of being a double agent…an outsider to Nursing.
Outsider Nursing
There is value to being an outsider in Nursing.
The benefit of a good work ethic that gets the job done and is not clouded by dogma is a perk for you as a patient. It does you no good if a nurse loudly proclaims a passion for caring if are lazy, incompetent, distracted, bossy, or just plain wrong.
Everybody cares. I tear up when people around me cry. I laugh or smile when others around me laugh or smile. I’m human.
I’ve found that to do nursing all you have to do is act naturally. It’s in our genes to care. You don’t have to be an exceptionally caring person to be a successful nurse. We all have the capacity to nurse and to heal.
In all of my years as a nurse, not one patient has ever said to me that I don’t care enough to be a nurse. Not once have I ever been accused of impersonating a nurse though there were times when I felt I was due to imposter syndrome.
My passion for objectivity in nursing is not clouded by a slavish interpretation of what it means to be caring. I am free of the religious-like devotion to the legal drug cartel and equipment supplier “literature”.
You as a client or patient receive the benefit of a nursing mind not imprinted with a rote passion for mainstream medical dogma, a dogma that teaches you to recite rather than look for incite. Instead, I take a sensible and human approach to Nursing.
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