Grateful: A Nurse's Point of View

'In everything give thanks, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus' -1 Thessalonians 5:18

     When I was about 10 years old, I decided I wanted to be a nurse. As a little girl, I thought I would graduate high school, become a nurse (apparently I thought it would happen over night because college was no where in my plans), be married by the time I was 21 (because 21 sounded so old back then) and have 2 little boys by the time I was 23...WRONG. First of all, proclaiming to be a nurse without any kind of college education is scary! Second, 21 is NOT old and I couldn't imagine being married at the age of 21 OR having 2 kids by the age of 23! What I didn't realize at the age of 10 is that nursing isn't just administering medicine, helping people get well instantly (like my pretend patients did when I played "hospital" when I was younger) & wearing cute scrubs. It is long 12 hour shifts, cleaning up poop, blood & vomit, suctioning mucous from breathing tubes, continuous charting, being talked down to by doctors some doctors, holding your pee for hours until you get a free minute to go to the bathroom & fighting with aggravating beeping monitors & IV pumps, just to name a few. These things might sound awful to some people, but seeing a patient go from extremely sick & not expected to live, to moving out to the floor to a regular room, totally outweighs all of the unpleasant stuff that I mentioned earlier. After 3 weeks long, uncertain weeks, today I watched my patient roll out of the ICU to go to a regular room. For the first time in my nursing experience, I watched a patient go from terrible to good (not great, yet). Knowing that I had a little part in that patient's recovery process makes my heart smile & makes me extremely grateful of this profession that God saw fit for me to be in.

     On my way to work Wednesday morning, I got to thinking about being grateful. I consider myself a grateful person, in general, but what am I grateful for? I thank God everynight (yes, I still say the same ole "now I lay me down to sleep..." prayer that I have prayed my whole life) for my friends & family, the food in my stomach, the clothes on my back and the roof over my head, but what about the little things that I take for granted everyday? I decided to buy a $0.99 app called "Gratitude Journal" & list 5 things that I am grateful for each day. I realize that I could have easily just written 5 things down on a piece of notebook paper & save the $0.99, but I thought the gratitude journal sounded super neat-o & it would be nice to look back & read them. I wanted to do a whole week in my gratitude journal before I did a blog post about it, but after watching my patient leave the unit today & feeling so grateful to be a part of the recovery process, I decided to blog about it tonight!!!

If you don't have the Gratitude Journal app, I encourage you to get it! Sure, it's $0.99 that you could have spent elsewhere, but it makes you think about that the small things in life that you might take for granted & it has brightened my days...and maybe it'll brighten yours!

"To do what nobody else will do, a way that nobody else can do, in spite of all we go through; that is to be a nurse" -Rawsi Williams