Nurses who don't have the "passion"

Nurses General Nursing

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Hello nurses, I'm not yet a nurse, I'm not even officially in nursing school. I'm just another Rn-hopeful. I have a couple of questions for a specific group of nurses. I'm talking about the nurses who didn't feel like nursing was their passion or calling. What made you start/stay in nursing? Did you learn to be be love your job? Or do you continue to do it because it's a job?

I sincerelely appreciate any answers that you guys can give. Thanks :)

Specializes in ICU / Urgent Care.

Long story short, "passion" makes a compelling story, but hard work makes you a good nurse.

Well said

Specializes in Hospice.

I am another one who took a somewhat non-traditional route...

I couldn't figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up and eventually earned my EMT license. I liked learning and wanted to be more financially stable so I slowly took some nursing prereqs through my local community college and enrolled in Excelsior College (back then EMT's were allowed to enroll). Over a 13 year span I completed my ASN. I worked at a physician's office and at a SNF before finding my niche in hospice. I still work part time in EMS too. It may seem like an odd fit (EMS and hospice) but it's what's right for me:)

In the beginning of my journey, I wouldn't say I had any passion for nursing. It was something that grew on me and developed over time.

Specializes in ICU.

I have learned to have a love/hate relationship with nursing.

I went in for a stable job, like many others. I even liked it at the beginning. Heck, I still enjoy patient care. I enjoy critical patients - I enjoy titrating drips, I enjoy having a million different machines in my rooms, and I really enjoy the heck out of the days where I was absolutely positively sure the patient was going to die on me but they made it through my shift. Had a great one of those Wednesday night and it was awesome!

What I hate is everything else. I hate being the coordination person. I hate having lab call me for a redraw when I know a lab was drawn correctly, just because the lab person thought it looked diluted. I hate drawing it again and them saying the same thing. I hate when a physician has been waiting for the lab result and I get a "What do you mean they are refusing to result it?! Tell them we expect it to be critical and they need to result it!" I also hate taking the time to, but get a lot of personal satisfaction out of, writing an incident report on the lab person for refusing to result a value, which resulted in a very preventable delay of care than nearly killed the patient.

I hate calling back and forth between MRI and RT. "MRI says they can take us now." "Well, nobody's free now, it's going to have to be in 30 minutes." I call MRI, they say 30 minutes is fine, and it's a plan. We finally get the resource RT in the room to manage the vent during the trip. Everything's packed up, I call MRI to see if they're still free - "Wait, we just got a code stroke in. They have to go first." Fine, fine... I tell the resource RT it's going to be about 45 minutes. MRI confirms that 45 minutes from now is a good time. In 45 minutes I call the resource person back because MRI's on the phone asking when I'm going to get there and the RT hasn't shown up yet... because he is now busy intubating somebody somewhere else and can't come, and none of the other RTs are free. MRI confirms that they have a spot now but someone else is scheduled for a MRI later, so I can't go if I don't go right then. And then I get a massive eye roll from the day shift nurse I give report to because I didn't get the patient to MRI when I "had all night to get it done."

All the little things, from nobody being available to help, to going through three IV pumps before I find one that doesn't have an error message and ding for no reason, to family asking, "What do you mean you don't have a recliner for me?!?!," to getting an attitude on the phone from a physician I had to wake up in the middle of the night because he didn't consult the intensivist or hospitalist group like he should have if he didn't want to be woken up in the middle of the night... it is all really starting to get on my nerves. I don't think I can do this much longer.

I never did think you had to have a passion to do something well, but I'm starting to think if you don't have a passion for nursing, all the bull crap you have to wade through to be a nurse is going to wear you down very quickly.

Specializes in Med/Surg, LTACH, LTC, Home Health.

My dad made me go to nursing school (only career he was willing to pay for); hungry kids and bills made me stay; that old-dawg-new-tricks thing is keeping me in it.

I don't remember why I chose nursing, but once I got into school I felt very passionate about it. Now that I'm actually a nurse, and have a lot of years under my belt and a family to care for, I feel slightly differently. Nursing is a job, and I love it some days, and I'm good at it. It may or may not be a calling, I don't know. I know that I have a knack for patient care. I don't feel it's a "calling," because that implies, to me, that it should take precedence over all other things. My children are my calling, and advocating for special needs is my calling. Helping people in some capacity is my calling, maybe, not so much nursing. I just happen to be a nurse, and I'm good at my job. If something less physically demanding with better pay and better hours came along that seemed like I'd enjoy doing it, and I wouldn't have to sacrifice my family for it, I'd walk away from nursing in a heartbeat.

Thank you all for your responses, it is greatly appreciated.

I will be starting nursing classes in the spring. Many of my classmates speak so passionately about nursing. As do all the nurses that I have talked to at school. It gets a little discouraging only hearing stories of people that have wanted to be a nurses since they were practically zygotes. I feared that it was impossible to make it unless you've always loved nursing.

I believe that committed is more important for success than the passion or "calling" that some people claim to have.

^I love this response. Thank you.

Specializes in ER, Med-surg.

It was definitely not a childhood dream of mine. I was drawn to it as an adult by a combination of practical reasons (stability, availability of training and jobs, good cost/benefit ratio) and meeting some nurses who I found personally inspiring and who were able to reassure me about some aspects of the job I had not understood correctly (the role of the nurse in the healthcare team as advocate, mostly).

I am passionate about some aspects of the job, especially patient education, but that became clear to me as I progressed, rather than pushing me to pursue nursing in the first place. Like anyone with functioning empathy, I get satisfaction and enjoyment from successes and helping people, but I never saw myself as a ministering angel going in, and my experience of peers who did aspire to that role suggests that some of them had a harder time than the rest of us with adjusting to the often brutal reality of modern nursing (which allots relatively little time for the nurturing aspects of nursing and places extreme pressure on nurses to manage technical and customer service roles under sometimes punishing conditions). They also seem to have higher rates of compassion fatigue/burnout/distress from negative experiences at work, possibly due to greater identification with their role.

So as long as one has a clear-eyed view of the nature of the work and a real interest in it, I don't think that a lack of "passion" is necessarily a hindrance to professional success, and it may even be something of a help.

Specializes in ER.

One thing I learned in nursing, especially in ED, was that passion/calling doesn't make a competent nurse. It takes competent, responsible person to be competent nurse. I was never compassionate and didn't have any calling as I was burned out early; but I was that good one that docs and nurses trusted, and got jobs done, and done. A job is a job. Most people don't do something because they love it, rather because they ran into it in life and it affords living. I would rather live in an Alaskan shore and run my own fishing boat if I could.

Earning money is a passion of mine.

Long story short, "passion" makes a compelling story, but hard work makes you a good nurse.

AMEN!

Specializes in Registered Nurse.

Nursing was once, and maybe still is, called a "helping" profession. People got into nursing to help others. I was one of those. Today, I think there are more "practical" people in nursing that get into it because it offers decent pay and plenty of work to be found compared to other professions.

Specializes in Cardiology, Cardiothoracic Surgical.

Do engineers, lawyers and accountants sit around and muse over whether their profession is a calling? Like are they on engineering boards contemplating these deep questions? I've always wondered this.

I asked my husband, an engineer, if they did, and he looked at me like I grew 2 heads.

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