my saturday night...

My clinical instructor invited me to go with her to our College of Nursing's 2008 Barbara Donaho Distinguished Leadership in Nursing Award Ceremony. It's a great event held every spring to honor nurses in our clinical settings who take the time to exemplify exceptional care in optimizing our (the students) learning experiences on the floor. With short staff and long hours, nurses are doing well to get their own jobs done, and these nurses actually made it a priority to not only take great care of their patients, but to help us be better nurses. That's a huge deal, and giving them an award is the least we can do for what they are doing for the future of nursing. Students at any level (BSN, MSN, PhD) can nominate any nurse they choose, and this year, we had 27 nominees. Two of them were nurses on the floor I'm currently on this semester, so I got to go represent the other 39 students who have been on that floor during this and last semester. I was the only student there with a clinical instructor, so I really saw it as a great honor, and I took advantage of the opportunity of such a formal, professional event. Many of the most distinguished professors, the dean, the assistant dean, leaders at area hospitals and even one of my professors, coordinator of our level of nursing, was there. It was wonderful event - a cocktail hour, dinner, and small speeches by Laura Cox Dzurec, our dean, and Barbara Donaho, the esteemed women after which this award was named. Karen D. Bankston, a previous nurse and friend of our College presented the awards, and then the evening closed with a dessert bar.

It was really beautiful to hear what all of these nurses did to future our profession through watching out for us "baby nurses." :) We have worked so hard to get here, and we are striving to learn whatever someone will take a minute to teach us. Without nurses like them, we would know nothing, and our patients would suffer as a result.

The evening was really about an appreciation of our profession... old nurses, newer nurses, all working together to touch the lives of millions through student nurses. What you teach one nurse will affect everyone she touches, wherever in the world the profession takes her, and when she teaches someone else the skill you took the time to teach her, that nurse's patients benefit as well. And so it goes. Taking a moment to help one of us can ultimately help the entire world. These 27 nurses saw that, and we thank them for it.

We thank them for it because they join us in seeing the future of this unglamorous, humble, yet so strikingly beautiful lifestyle and we have given our lives to carry it to levels only our generation can see. We hear of where nursing was - a trade, a job - and we see where so many hard-working nurses have taken it... into a profession, a license, a RN, a BSN, a MSN, even a PhD. We used to be on the battlefronts risking our lives to help soldiers, we used to be looked down upon for doing a "dirty" job. And now? We're at the top of the healthcare field, past the MDs and sitting with the CEOs. We represent the largest sector of healthcare and for good reason. We work in law, medicine, forensics, schools. We work in rural areas, urban hospitals, third-world countries, and even on airplanes. We make smiles. We calm fears. We literally save lives every single day.

Congratulations to those who see the future in us, for those who know how to cultivate this profession by embracing, not eating, their young.



Me and my clinical instructor