What has been your most meaningful job as a nurse?

kakamegamama · Dec 11, 2014

Working in a free/low cost clinic for uninsured/underinsured. Bush clinics. Someplace other than hospitals/offices that care for middle-upper economic class patients.

Farawyn · Dec 11, 2014

Meaningful to ME: Working in Employee Health in a hospital. I learned so much about Occ. Health and got to draw blood, administer vaccines, lots of needle-y stuff. I worked with only nurses with one overseeing MD. Great experience.

Meaningful to patients: Night shift float bedside geriatric, med surg, oncology, ortho, tele, etc.

GoldenRoya · Mar 2, 2015

A few weeks ago, I took care of a patient who was dying. In fact, I was surprised when he made it through my shift. I thought, 'He won't be here when I come back tomorrow, he's going to go overnight.' Imagine my surprise when he was still there the next morning.

About mid-shift, I had some unexpected free time, and decided to give this man a bed bath. I figured it would take maybe 15 minutes. By the time I was done, 45 minutes had elapsed. I found some of his personal care items in the bathroom and applied deodorant, combed his hair, did some really good oral care to freshen his breath. I washed and lotioned his feet. I gave his hands a light massage. He was unresponsive throughout, but it didn't matter, because this was my gift to him.

Four hours later, he died. His daughter came and thanked me. She told me that he had always been a fastidious man, and she was sure that he'd been holding on because he wanted to be clean before he met Jesus.

~miss_mercy_me · Mar 9, 2015

He was unresponsive throughout, but it didn't matter, because this was my gift to him.

~Absolutely love your heart and your passion for nursing.

Elvish, BSN, DNP, RN, NP · Mar 10, 2015

Community health center with a large migrant farmworker population. There is so much meaningful work to be done. The best part for me was meeting the farmworkers at the camps where they lived and worked and providing care there. So much education, reassurance, and emotional support.

It also felt really really good when we could save someone a trip to the ER that they'd never have been able to afford and would have been difficult at best to navigate. A lot of new guys would come in nearly unresponsive with green tobacco sickness and we'd give them some PR phenergan and 2-3 liters of IVF, they'd walk out like brand new people. Not a terribly complicated fix but they'd have been in the ER otherwise.