Are You Nurse Jackie or Nurse Zoey?

After binge watching Nurse Jackie recently, I can't stop thinking about the show. If you haven't seen it, stop here! because I don't want to spoil it for you. If you have seen it, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Are You Nurse Jackie or Nurse Zoey?

I resisted watching Showtime's Nurse Jackie for a very long time. I'm not really a TV series person. Too much commitment. Plus I don't have Showtime. And past medical shows have usually disappointed.

But recently I watched my first episode of Nurse Jackie on Netflix. Within 2 weeks I had binge watched all seven seasons. I found the show so addictive and the storyline so compelling that I couldn't wait to watch each following episode. I'm still processing it and analyzing why it had such a hold on me.

Nurse Jackie is set in the emergency department of All Saints Hospital in New York city. The main character, Jackie, is an ED nurse, as is her perky protege, Zoey.

I got hooked because the main characters are nurses, the storyline is compelling, and Nurse Jackie herself is a train wreck. Edie Falco does such a phenomenal job of being Nurse Jackie that I feel as if I know her, that we could work side by side next shift. Or maybe I was hooked because of the secret vicarious thrill I got when Jackie mouths off to administrators and doctors (with good reason, mind you).

Categorized as a comedy/drama, it's a dark comedy and more drama than comedy. Warning- it's not PG. Not for everyone and not a feel-good Hallmark type series. (There's way more sex going on in that ED than any ED I've ever worked in).

The show is really about drug addiction. Jackie is a top performing ED nurse...and also a pill-popping addict. At first, no one knows except for Eddie, the Pharmacist, who supplies Jackie with pain pills and who incidentally is also having an affair with her.

As time goes on, Jackie's drug use increases and her world starts spinning out of control. Colleagues at work begin to suspect she is using. Fentanyl patches go missing. Narcotic counts are off. At home, Jackie's husband, Kevin, divorces her while their two daughters are hurt by her unpredictable behavior and begin to act out. The story goes on to show the high cost of addiction.

As soon as it aired back in 2009, the show was instantly controversial. Some nursing associations protested that a show featuring a nurse doing many of the truly shocking and harmful things Jackie does should be taken off the air.

But there's no denying Nurse Jackie is much more realistic than most medical shows involving nurses. It shows a new doctor who misdiagnoses a patient, despite Jackie's warning. As a result, the patient dies. There's trauma and drama in every episode, craziness that only ED nurses know too well. There's short-staffing and frequent flyers.

Drug use aside, Jackie is a committed clinician whose passion is helping patients. Then there's Zoey. Zoey follows Jackie everywhere, a newbie soaking in everything. You fall in love with charming Zoey and admire Jackie while being horrified at her behavior- the behavior of a user.

Personality-wise, there's a version of a Nurse Jackie and a Nurse Zoey on every nursing unit.

Nurse Jackie

Nurse Jackie is a drug addict who steals your heart. A sociopath and a saint. Nurse Jackie breaks the rules, she's irreverent and a rogue nurse at times...but only when it helps patients. On one episode, she performs an emergency needle decompression of a tension pneumothorax, saving the life of a cab driver. Completely out of nursing scope of practice, but there was no doctor available, and Jackie saved his life. What would you do?

She rules her ED. She's witty and willful. Bossy and biting. Cynical and compassionate.

Tough with a heart, she cares about each of her patients and fights for what they need.

She has zero work-life balance. A nurse to the core, her entire identity is based on being a nurse. She once said "if I'm not a nurse...I'm no one. I'm nothing." Sad. Outspoken and mouthy, she's brutally honest (except when she's lying :).

The Nurse Jackie on most every unit? They are the ultimate pro, the gruff charge nurse, the nurse everyone respects and looks up to. They even intimidate doctors.

Nurse Zoey

Nurse Zoey, Jackie's protege, is soft and self-effacing. She wears kitty scrubs. Sweet and spunky, she lacks Jackie's sharp edges. She's adorably quirky and in addition to starting her nursing career, she is moving out of her parent's house and dating a paramedic she met at All Saint's.

Unlike Jackie, who rarely filters herself, Zoey chooses her words carefully and tactfully. She is honest and sensitive. Nurse Zoey is becoming an excellent ED nurse in her own right under Jackie's tutelage but doesn't yet know how good she is.

Zoey is a best friend to Jackie to the end. She's loyal, supportive and refuses to believe anything negative about Jackie, her hero.

Is Nurse Zoey really just a younger Nurse Jackie? Idealistic and inexperienced?

Are you a Nurse Jackie or a Nurse Zoey? No doubt you, like most of us, are a complex person. Maybe you are a mix of both, a strong nurse with frailties.

And maybe that's one of the points of the show's writers.

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Nurse Beth

About Nurse Beth, MSN

Career Columnist / Author

Nurse Beth is an Educator, Writer, Blogger and Subject Matter Expert who blogs about nursing career advice at http://nursecode.com

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Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.

I am complex mix of both.

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I am not Nurse Jackie and don't want to be so I agree with those initial assessment from nursing associations. She ripped the heart out of her family, she is selfish, and puts patients in danger. I would not look up to a nurse like Jackie so I guess I'm not Zoey either. ;)

However, I don't consider tv dramas to be true representations of the medical field. That's why I don't get upset if some nurse is wearing her stethoscope backwards. Same thing with the shows about lawyers or cops or firefighters. It is just fantasy.

Jackie could just as easily be playing a drug enforcement cop who goes bad.

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Specializes in Medsurg/ICU, Mental Health, Home Health.

Can't I be Carol or Haleh from ER? :)

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Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.

I am betting, Spideys, you did not watch the series, ( 7 seasons) because if you did, you would see Jackie was a complex and very decent as well as imperfect character. I could not write her off as bad or "sociopathic" but she sure did have her faults and bad points. She was HUMAN however, and I loved her character.

And it's TV so I don't agree with nursing associations getting all up in arms over tv shows like this. There was a time when I used to but I don't take myself so seriously and think our nursing associations have much bigger fish to fry.

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Unfortunately, my admitted bias is against drug addicts. First day of nursing school, our instructor asked us to go home that afternoon and think about what our biases might be and then come back the next day to share. When we all had our turn talking, the instructor said that the exercise was to make us realize our biases so we never ever let it/them hinder our care of patients.

So, I don't let it hinder my care of patients.

My multitude of experiences with people who chose drugs over their families has made me unsympathetic to drug addicts. This includes my own family. I've had to report many so-called parents who smoked meth in front of their young children, whose home was littered with filth, whose children were hurt due to lack of care.

If Jackie is so smart and compassionate, she needed to go into rehab. For the sake of her children. Or leave her husband and children behind and never come back until she was well.

I didn't watch all of the shows. The first season soured me on the show.

Again, I'm not complaining about showing nursing in a bad light.

I just don't like it when drug addicts chose drugs over their kids. That's child abuse.

I'm not a fan of child abuse.

(SBE and I are friends ya'll - so no worries). :inlove:

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Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.

It hits close to home for me cause I love dearly a couple of drug addicts (in recovery). And Jackie DID go into rehab. She got clean a year. She relapsed. She messed up. Her kids wound up with their dad. The story goes and on and ends with what appears, tragically, an overdose, in the series ending.

I used to have very strong biases against drug addicts til it hit close to home when I learned a few people in my own family who I KNOW are good people have a problem and a disease got caught up in the spiral. So I see it differently, I would suppose. Changed my whole outlook as has going through the 12 steps of AL-ANON.

Nothing like having ones you love affected to change your biases....a lot.

And I learned the hard way, to never say

"never".

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Specializes in ICU.

I'd love to be a Jackie (sans drugs) but am firmly, in all my embarrassingly earnest enthusiasm, a Zoey. I love both characters. And I'd like Dr O'Hara's style and panache.

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Other than the strong patient advocacy and being around awhile I can't identify with either, it sounds interesting though.

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As a nursing student, are they both portraying nurses accurately Via the media?

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It hits close to home for me cause I love dearly a couple of drug addicts (in recovery). And Jackie DID go into rehab. She got clean a year. She relapsed. She messed up. Her kids wound up with their dad. The story goes and on and ends with what appears, tragically, an overdose, in the series ending.

I used to have very strong biases against drug addicts til it hit close to home when I learned a few people in my own family who I KNOW are good people have a problem and a disease got caught up in the spiral. So I see it differently, I would suppose. Changed my whole outlook as has going through the 12 steps of AL-ANON.

Nothing like having ones you love affected to change your biases....a lot.

And I learned the hard way, to never say

"never".

In "recovery" is good. Those who chose not to do so over and over again . . . well, there has to come a time to say "never" with people who will only hurt you.

I'm involved with a family right now where both parents are meth users, their adult children are meth users, and there are 5 little kids in the home. From toddler to 11 year old. CPS is involved. It is heartbreaking to walk into that home and see the bedroom door closed because the adult kids are smoking meth while the little kids play in the living room. One of the nurses broke down after a visit and admitted she wanted to take the kids out to her car and take them home with her. One of the hardest things we've had to do is work with that family.

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However, I don't consider tv dramas to be true representations of the medical field. That's why I don't get upset if some nurse is wearing her stethoscope backwards.

Your comment got me looking at people's stethoscope around their necks. Is it diaphragm facing in or out?

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