Nursing is Just a Job - Common Myths in Nursing

[The_Optimist]

Nursing is just a job

For some it may be a calling,all well and good but for most, it is simply just a job.

When you learn to look at it scientifically without having too much expectation of suddenly becoming all altruistic or Nightingalish”, you would truly have a better time and go at it.

Common Myths (& facts) in Nursing

Myth: Becoming a nurse means becoming angelic overnight

Fact: Nope! If you were Dracula before nursing school, you will still be Dracula after nursing school (and if you weren't, you'd become one!:)

Myth: Everyone is pleasant in nursing

Fact: Nope! Nursing is a job and like all jobs you get the good mixed in with the bad

Myth: You suddenly feel called to a purpose

Fact: Nope! Nursing is a job , a darn good job that pays the bills and keeps up whatever lifestyle you have is all it is.

Myth: You become a martyr

Fact: Nope! You still have choices and it is up to you to decide whether you want to be stepped on or not.

So understand that nursing is just a job. When you put things in perspective, you find that you have a clearer sense of what it is that you do or don't want. Peace;)

[cocoa_puff]

I think nursing is a "calling" for some, a profession for many, a career for most, and a just job for the rest.

[SororAKS, ADN, RN]

I would call it neither "a calling", nor "just a job" for most nurses.

I see it as a profession, or at least a highly skilled trade.

I see it as a profession as well.

[Teresag_CNS]

I may have misunderstood what you meant by "Nightingalish," but it sounds like you're not familiar with her life and career. Florence Nightingale defied her parents as a young woman to study the nursing profession because she felt strongly about devoting herself to something useful in life rather than marrying and settling down to what she considered a life of idleness typical of upper-class women. She revolutionized hospital care and nursing education. She was the first woman inducted into the Royal Statistical Society for her work in the then-new field of epidemiology. She was not doing "a job." She was committed to improving health through nursing.

[Teresag_CNS]

I think it's important that we nurses not allow employers to define us. Although they may treat us as a necessary evil (and I believe that is true), we don't have to embrace that misrepresentation of our profession.

Nursing is a profession. Employers (and policymakers, and often the public and physicians) might choose to treat us as less than a profession, but that does not change my identity.

[Here.I.Stand, BSN, RN]

He told me that the man is the head of the household, and if I didn't submit to my husband I was breaking God's laws.

I love how the men who go around quoting (or paraphrasing) those verses forget the part commanding husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church. In other words, sacrificially -- Christ doesn't beat or otherwise lose his temper with the church.