In 1987, Mary Mallison, editor of AJN, posed a provocative question in her editorial: “How can you bear to be a nurse?” She offered several questions that the public often asks nurses, and provided clever (and sometimes powerful) responses that nurses could use to correct the public’s misunderstanding. A few examples:

How can you be a nurse? How can you bear the sight of blood?
Wait until you slide a catheter into a tiny vein just before it collapses. The flashback of blood you see will make you sing.

How can you be a nurse? How can you bear the sight and smell of feces?
Wait until you’ve been anxious about the diarrhea that nothing has stopped in an AIDS patient. Finally, your strategies work and you see and smell normal stool. You’ll welcome that smell.

How can you be a nurse? So many of your patients are so old, so sick, these days. How can you bear the thought that, in the end, your care may make no difference?
Wait until you’ve used your hands and eyes and voice to dispel terror, to show a helpless person that his life is respected, that he has dignity. Your caring helps him care about himself. His helplessness forces you to think about the brevity of your own life.

This editorial is probably my all-time favorite, as it is for many nursing colleagues. Today, however, witnessing all that nurses are experiencing, I find myself rhetorically asking practicing nurses the same question Mallison posed then: How can you bear to be a nurse? But the challenges today seem infinitely more daunting, and my responses inadequate:

How can you be a nurse? How can you take care of patients who reject all that you’re trying to do, and call you a liar for telling them that they have COVID?
How can you be a nurse? How can you watch more patients die than recover?
How can you be a nurse? How can you maintain compassion in the face of violence, abuse, anger, resistance?
How can you be a nurse? How can you reconcile the possibility of endangering your own family while working to save others?

Nurses have always been heroes.

Despite differences in the times we live in now, much of the wisdom offered in Mallison’s editorial is apt today:

“No easy answers. . . . You have days of frustration, nights of despair, terrible angers. Your highs and lows are peaks and chasms, not hills and valleys. The defeats come more than often enough to keep you humble: the problems you can’t untangle, the lives that seep away too fast, the meanings that elude your understanding. But you keep working at it, learning from it, knowing the next peak lies ahead.”

And while I don’t have answers, I can tell each of you what your heroism as a nurse means to the lives you are touching: to the patients even if they don’t recover; to the family members who know their loved one didn’t die alone; to those of us—out here—your colleagues who know what you are going through, who have also faced enormous challenges but none such as these, and who are in awe of what you are doing. Thank you.

Joanne Disch, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor ad honorem, University of Minnesota School of Nursing, Minneapolis.