Happy New Year.

I haven’t posted a blog update for almost a couple of months. It isn’t that I haven’t been thinking things to write; I have just been a bit busy. But wait, that isn’t the only reason I haven’t written anything. I haven’t wanted to write about nursing. My nurse’s soul is TIE…ERD. This last year has been approximately four years long in the world of nursing. What was supposed to be a much better year for healthcare turned out to be just more of the same; and in some instances far worse because of the fall-out of the pandemic and the horrible decisions senior executives have been making for their healthcare organizations.

Values have shifted, virtue is hard to find, and working within your calling feels like a pipe dream at this point.

BUT…ya know what is still there? The patients. The staff. That is, after all, why I go to work. It is for the people I work with and the patients we treat. It is very thin ice though. I can hear the cracks moving across the ice. Afraid to move, the nursing staff holds their collective breath shift after shift.

The nursing staff is so unsupported, with resources, with emotional and physical support; and help of any kind. They are being asked to do so much more with so much less.

What is the answer? Why do nurses want to go to work as they look down the calendar of a new year stretched out before them? What is feeding their nurses’ souls?

I have found that it helps my psyche to remind myself that this is a job. When I get overly excited (not in a good way), or have too much energy on a subject to do with the hospital, patients, or healthcare in general; I have to remind myself that this is a job. I get to go home and I am being paid. If I am so unhappy in my current situation I can move my happy ass to a different nursing job. It is hard to turn off caring about the patient’s outcomes; and that is not what I am saying to do, nor do I want to do that. What I am suggesting though, is to remember that I can make change in my own practice, with my own patients. I can give my opinion and I can vote on things. And when I leave work, I need to leave it there.

We have gotten so mired in the mud of modern day medicine that we have a hard time finding the beauty in it. The bad days far out-weigh the good. And yet…there is light. It is a new year. A beginning.

May we see this time of year as a season of renewal. Maybe nothing will actually change where we work. But we can change. We can change the one thing we have control over- our attitudes (and by our I mean mine).

We need to give ourselves permission to be: HAPPY. Silly. Vulnerable. At peace.

Allow yourself to enjoy the thing you were called to do.

Happy New Year!