The real picture of what it is to be a nurse. Sweet, sweat, bodily fluids and more.

This story by Tilda Shalof expresses part of the same journey she describes in her book The Making of a Nurse. Only she wrote A Nurse’s Story first and I read it second. Still very highly recommended — for anyone with a stout heart that is.

It is perfectly titled. In each chapter she explores an area of nursing care:

• How the primary object nurses are known by is a bedpan and its infamous contents
• Giving compassionate care without judgment
• When is SO much care too much care
• Graduation with a degree is only the beginning of the journey to becoming a nurse
• Finding your niche within nursing
• The complex complimentary and contradictory relationship between doctors and nurses
• Keeping you as a person separate from you as a nurse: for sanity sake and the patient’s sake

I was constantly surprised at her bravery and thankful for her sharing.

how she doesn’t care  who laughs or snickers at her opinions and what she feels strongly about
how many decisions about end of life care are left in a nurse’s hands
how she able to label when she was defencive or angry and then use those situations to improve her care
how determined she is to advance the profession of nursing and chuck out the bedpan
how her natural inquisitiveness led to  nursing research
how she overcomes herself to become an awesome nurse

Once again she had me in tears on one page, my fingers wishing I could be part of a procedure on the next page. I’d read anything she wrote.

And I’m so immensely proud that she is out there speaking on our behalf with such optimism about our profession. I think that’s what I love best about Tilda. She knows all the pros and cons of nursing, but she doesn’t seem hardened by them. Her writing shows that she practices with immense hope and energy, all to the benefit of her work and patients. If only I could be one-quarter of the nurse she is one day.

If I live up to it, please put this quote from her book on my gravestone…

“She was a woman who conquered herself so that she could serve others.”

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