I mean, cattle have herds, lions have a pride, there is a murder of crows, and it’s a nurse’s station of Karens. Yeah, I know, I know, nursiepoo, didn’t you get in trouble for insulting nurses?  Well, kids, if the shoe fits…

Look, not all nurses are bad, and Hitler had some good ideas…

Ok, enough, in all seriousness, there is a huge problem in nursing. Nursing never left the image of the nun or handmaiden.  Yep, in many respects, the nurse is just “the help.” If this is the first time you hear this, well, welcome to the Thunderdome kids.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at any hospital bill and look at the line item charges.  You will see Pharmacy, not only as a total charge, but each drug, each IV, everything is itemized.  The doctor? You bet their service, as well as the hospitalist, is a line item. Respiratory Therapy, Physical therapy, and Supplies like Band-Aids up to IV tubing are all billed.  Most of those are billed each on a separate line. Can you find Nursing services there?

You won’t.  What you will find is something called a bed charge.  Yep, this is what your insurance (or you) pay for the bed. The bed you put your butt in a while in the hospital. Included in that charge is the upkeep of that bed, which (survey says) belongs to nursing.

Why? I have never been truly able to ascertain an exact reason, but to hazard a guess, nurses are servants in the larger sense.  When the nuns were nurses, it was viewed as a matter of “service,” not as professional.  When Florence interjected herself in the field hospitals of the Crimean War, it was to serve the doctors and patients. We never grew from that.

Oh yeah, we took off the hats and threw on scrubs, and we all bought ourselves stethoscopes and learned assessment skills. However, before you even listen to your first lung sound, or hell even take a pulse? You learn to make and change a bed.  This simple act alone should tell you what the medical profession and hospitals view nurses as.  Afterward, at least for me, it was pericare (cleaning someone’s junk), bathing, bedpans, etc.  I didn’t even put my fancy stethoscope to a chest until the 3rd semester.  Hell, my instructors in nursing school, while talented professionals, were primarily taught by nuns.  So it is hard to dig out of that mindset fast.

So why do we stay stuck there?  The simple answer is that we cannot stop biting each other’s back long enough to form a united front. Although my first union was not nursing-focused, it was an arm of the Teamsters’. We do have nursing associations and nursing unions. Yet the Teamsters are a union that has no idea what nurses do.  In all irony, we were part of the same folks who maintain the hospital rooms (get it bed charge).

Many nurses blame Medical Associations for blocking any type of nursing professional acceptance.  Maybe, but far more likely is that nurses don’t act like other professionals in the hospital. Often I have had a physician ask me why are nurses “that way to each other.” I am never able to answer, not for lack of trying.

Don’t believe me? Well, you should.  This backbiting is the kind of high school antics that nurses do to other nurses.

Recently a person entered my call room while I was dozing off (yeah, I am not supposed to, but).  I will tell you straight up that having been raped in a very similar way (not by a nurse, thankfully). The entire concept is completely violating. When I took a strong stance that I was displeased, The nurse intruder reported me for sleeping, never mind that the person essentially snuck in my office, and I reported it. After the reporting, the petty started.

I was accused of wearing only my boxer shorts in the hallway (I don’t have any, by the way).  Ok, so I wear running shorts when I work because it is hot as the devil’s balls in my office.  I walked 10 feet to the bathroom with no shoes on.  Guess what? The understaffed folks on the nursing unit were spending more time watching me on camera than patients.  My office and bathroom are not visible from the nursing unit, nor are they anywhere near a patient.  I was seen peripherally by a camera.  Petty enough yet?

My social media mistake was epic. I now recommend , is that no matter how well you like someone, you should care about who can see your Facebook, etc. As stated in the beginning, I was accused of saying nurses suck.  Well, you have seen two other reasons.

Even trying to set a boundary in MY office space was met with a nursing manager pulling the sign off the door and chastising me for setting a boundary.  It said Off-Limits on it. Petty as fuck.  If you wonder why nursing can’t move forward, it is the concept that we don’t respect each other.  Until we respect each other, we cannot respect our profession enough to present a united front.

We have to be on our game, and honestly, appearance is everything. People who spend time cutting each other down are pretty much unable to build the group up. Nursing needs a do better speech almost every second.  Yeah, we work hard in general, but until we leave the idea of just servitude in the dust and start doing professional assessments and interventions, we are nothing more than servants, sorry guys.

Be the kind of person your dog and your mom hope you are.