Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Most nurses I know enjoy Nurses Week as an acknowledgment of the very important work we do every day. Nurses’ Week can also be an opportunity to think about our own needs, or to practice “self-care,” a term I find problematic because I worry it has become one of those ideas that nurses get blamed for the absence of, as in, a nurse is stressed on the job because he hasn’t done his “self-care.” However, regardless of how management discusses “self-care,” it’s an important idea: that nurses need breaks, moments to relax, have fun, and nourish our own humanity so that we come to work ready to humanely care for patients.

The problem with doing a hard job, like nursing, is that recovery is hard, too, and when the job itself seems to expect employees to be superhuman, finding the will to really care for ourselves can be difficult. I discovered how truly challenging that can be after being diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in September 2017. At the time I was working as a per diem home hospice nurse and I knew instinctively that I could not care well for dying patients when I was worried about dying myself. That is, I felt I owed it to my patients to take a leave of absence, but as a nurse I felt like a failure. Wasn’t I supposed to be invulnerable?

A time to tear and a time to mend.

In my new book, Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient, I write about making the decision to take a leave from work and how hard it was. Nothing in my training supported the idea that taking time off might be the right thing for me to do as a person and a nurse. Ultimately, I found comfort in Bible verses, applying ancient wisdom to my struggle to reconcile the emotional weight of my diagnosis with the demanding work ethic of nursing:

Fear messes with your mind. I’ve known nurses and doctors who worked through their cancer treatment. I don’t know why they were able to do it when I couldn’t. Maybe they were less afraid than I was, or maybe they never acknowledged their fear, or maybe they had to work…I only know that I could not be a cancer patient and a hospice nurse at the same time. Do you know these lines from Ecclesiastes?

There is a time for everything,
a time to be born and a time to die
a time to tear and a time to mend.

A time to tear and a time to mend. It makes sense, but I had never applied that dichotomy to myself: A time to care for others and a time to be cared for? Maybe so. A time to work and a time to heal, for me, I guess. Of course.

As time passed during my cancer treatment, I came to understand that not working as a nurse was absolutely the right decision for me. I was lucky, too, in that my husband and I could afford for me to take time off. And, when it felt right, I returned to work in home hospice, a better nurse because of being a patient, and because I had not pressured myself to be a superhuman cancer patient–nurse.

The point is, the health care system rides nurses hard and we drive ourselves pretty hard, too. During Covid it became clear that people can break under that strain—and a lot of nurses, and other health care workers, did. As I’ve gone around the country giving talks to promote Healing, I’ve often quoted this line from Mona Masood, a psychiatrist who treated doctors struggling during the pandemic: “You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.”

A nurse who is also a person.

Too often as nurses we stand ready with the match, or someone hands us the match. But we don’t have to sacrifice ourselves to do the job well, and we shouldn’t. Burned up nurses are no good to anyone, most of all themselves.

So this Nurses Week, think about yourself as a nurse who is also a person. Think about what might make you happy, and then, if at all possible, do that thing, or some approximation of it. Your patients need you to focus first on yourself.

Theresa Brown, nurse and writer, is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and writes AJN’s What I’m Reading column. Her most recent book is Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient (Algonquin Books, 2022). Visit her website at www.theresabrownrn.com. 

To hear Theresa Brown discuss her new book and how the American health care system lets patients down with AJN editor-in-chief emerita Shawn Kennedy, listen to this podcast:

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