“I entered this new chapter in my life running at full speed. But at nearly the same time, the world seemed to be coming to a full stop.”

That’s from the August Reflections essay in AJN: “2020: What a Time to Become a Nurse.” Alicia Sgroi finished nursing school and started as an RN in a Florida ICU in February 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to get a foothold in the United States. By June, her unit had been converted to a COVID-positive step-down unit.

Much has been written about the pressures and trauma of being a nurse during the pandemic. We know that it’s been tough for all nurses, sometimes overwhelmingly so. In fact, the original research article in the August issue of AJN is a study that looks at personal and institutional factors affecting levels of well-being and resilience among nurses during the pandemic, from staffing to support networks to personal resilience.

Rising to the occasion.

As a new nurse, Sgroi was understandably worried about catching the virus and also about having the skills to care for such patients. But as she tells it, far from discouraging her from continuing as a nurse, the experience taught her confidence and made her into a nurse.

As she observes, not being prepared when she walked into a patient’s room simply wasn’t an option. The bar was set high from the beginning, both in the necessary attention to myriad details and on so many other levels.

But something in her came into focus as she rose to the challenge. She writes:

“I know the compassion and preparedness I’ve learned in this short period will stay with me throughout my career as a nurse. Being able to practice what I love while making a difference in the lives of my patients gives me an overall feeling of content and assures me that I am exactly where I am supposed to be. In fact, these are all reasons why I became a nurse in the first place. So, to the people who say to me, ‘What a time to become a nurse’—I couldn’t agree more. What a time to become a nurse indeed!”

None of this is to downplay the horrors and miseries of the past year and a half, or the ongoing struggles of weary nurses now facing yet another surge of mostly unvaccinated patients in certain areas of the country. But there’s something in this new nurse’s story that goes beyond nursing to the universal question of vocation and what we are really capable of doing under pressure, when we feel an urgent call. The article will be free to read for the month of August.