Today is National Nurses' Day. While I was searching online for quotes, images, and other sufficient ways to honor nurses, I came across this wonderful story on a blog written by nurses, for nurses.

I have known some wonderful nurses in my life, as friends, family, and simply as nurses. There is a level of giving and patience that a nurse possesses that enables them to touch and change lives, both of their patients and of their patients' families. Some days their impact is more obvious than others, but whether they are saving lives in a busy emergency room or sitting with the tiniest patient in the furthest corner room of the quietest hospital floor, the nurse's impact is felt deeply and forever. This story from nursestory.com will explain why.

Once upon a time, many, many years ago in the middle of a dark and cold night, in a time that seems now almost like another life time… a young Nurse sat in a rocking chair in a dark corner of a neonatal ICU. She sat there oblivious to the quiet but purposeful bustle of nurses, alarms, and continued activity that occurs in any patient care unit at all hours of the day or night.

The Nurse sat rocking, not thinking about her own obvious youth, naivety, or even the fact that it was not her night to be here in the ‘Unit’. What she was contemplating were the events that had brought her knowingly or not, to this moment. She tried to pinpoint it. Had it been that day, not so long ago, when the doctor she was shadowing for a high school project had thought he was dumping her on a nurse to baby sit her and instead had planted the idea that nursing might in fact be more exciting that medicine? Or perhaps it was the days she spent next to her mother’s bedside after she had suffered a myocardial infarction and subsequent open heart surgery at the young age of 41? Perhaps still it was her drive for independence, picking a unit to work in straight out of nursing school where new graduates were not only shunned, but where lateral violence ran rampant against them. Then again maybe it had been the desire to communicate more clearly with and connect to the patients and families she now found herself strangely in charge of.

Had she connected too well? Had she pushed the envelope of patient-nurse relationship? How much was too much, she wondered as she sat here on her first night off in many, feeling the disapproving looks of several senior nurses in the unit as she slowly rocked back and forth. Sitting now, alone in a corner of the ICU she pondered all of this.

Only an hour before a phone call had awakened her at home. A fellow nurse who was caring for an infant that they had both been unofficially deemed primary nurses for the past several weeks, because frankly the continued struggle and resuscitation of this dying infant had been too much for many of the others to watch. The nurse on the phone had reported that the infant was now obviously dying and had asked her if she wanted to come and be here as the parents could not bring themselves, for whether physical or emotional reasons, to do so. Now, as she sat holding the small beautiful lifeless 2lb bundle of what had been only an hour ago a struggling, suffering human, trying multiple times and finally succeeding to exit his young life she contemplated all of it. She decided that in this moment, whatever it was that led her to become this nurse, for this one life… everything was all as it should be. Every extended shift, every struggle, every feeling of inadequacy, every single step…. All of it worth being present in this most humbling human moment.

The Nurse grew older, had more patient connections, healed others, made more mistakes, learned more professional and life lessons, and pursued new paths and adventures in nursing. However, she never forgot the night she came in on her night off to rock a lifeless baby in a corner of an ICU so many years ago, the night where she first realized that everything that it took to be a nurse was well worth the cost indeed.