Celebrating Nurses

Happy Nurses Week!  Thank you from the deepest part of my heart for your service to others.  My calling to be a nurse was something that came from the core of my being.  To care for another, to lift someone’s spirits with a smile or a touch, to comfort an aching soul, to minister to an injured or frail body may be your job, but it is also who you are at your marrow, someone who genuinely cares about the welfare of others.

We go to nursing school to learn the principals of professional nursing, but as Florence Nightingale, our founder of modern nursing said in 1860 in her book Notes On Nursing:  “Every woman…has at one time or another had personal charge of somebody, whether child or invalid—in other words, every woman is a nurse.”  (In 2020 many men fit into that group too.)

No matter where you offer your gifts,

• at the bedside dressing a patients wound
• in an Intensive Care Unit managing complex machines to keep people alive
• in a psychiatric unit talking a suicidal person into living
• teaching students
• managing complex treatments and medications for dying patients in a hospice
• CEO of enormous health care systems

it all started with your desire to care.  Caring for another human being to ease their suffering and offer comfort is your calling.

Where would we be without you? Nurses, you are the living examples of the best of who we are as a society.  Care. Compassion. Comfort. Those are your weapons. Intelligence. Courage. Resilience. Those are your constant companions.

Whether you have a Doctorate in Nursing and are setting standards of care for millions of people or you have no formal training and are sitting at the bedside of a frail elder, you are among a sisterhood of care.  I am honored to stand with you in the cause of care.  I celebrate you and your dedication to the greater good of humanity.

Bless you, all.  I appreciate you all.