Should You Become a Nurse?

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I want to answer the question:

should you become a nurse?

Because it is a question that I get asked rather often, but can be difficult to answer on the fly. Because I feel that to answer this honestly, it really can’t be a simply yes or no response.

Before someone decides to become a nurse, I feel that it is important to know some facts. If you become a nurse:

You will be assaulted while doing your job. [1] [2]
You will experience a significant trauma and will likely develop PTSD from doing your job. [3] [4]
You will significantly injure yourself at least once. [5] [6] [7]
You will work holidays and weekends.
You will be mandated and be on-call.
The national mean pay rate for an RN is $39 an hour. [8]
The national mean starting pay rate for an RN is $30. [8]
You will be in one of the top 10 highest demand profession in the nation.
You will be invited into the most intimate moments of people’s lives. You will do work that truly matters.
You will have a ton of options with one degree.

Alright, those are the facts. Now let’s talk about them a bit, shall we?

If you choose to become a nurse, know that you enter the most dangerous profession in our country. One in four nurses has been abused in the workplace. Overall, the likelihood of health care workers being exposed to violence is higher than prison guards or police officers. The stories nurses tell are horrifying, and all too common. I have many of my own. Every day, nurses are stabbed, punched, grabbed, kicked, verbally assaulted, or worse.

But this isn’t the only risk that you will face.

Nursing has higher rates of injury than construction and law enforcement. Some of the most common injuries that orderlies, nursing assistants, personal care aids and registered nurses experience are: torn rotator cuffs, sprains and strains, joint injuries and herniated discs. The constant demands placed on our bodies from patient lifting leads to more injuries than all other occupations combined. On top of that, the kinds of injuries that nurses suffer tend to have life long consequences which often include disability and chronic pain.

But it is not just your body that will be at risk.

Seeing people in terrible states is a routine part of a nurse’s job. We hold the hands of the dying, comfort those who are left behind, close the dead eyes of children and do our best to save as many as possible. Research estimates that 28.4% of nurses have a probable diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder with 15.4% experiencing severe symptoms. To put this number into context, those who fought in the Operations Iraqi Freedom conflict have experienced the highest rate of PTSD at 29%. The overall war veteran PTSD rate is 7%. This means that nurses are 3 times more likely to develop PTSD than a war veteran and are not far behind those who were involved in the most traumatic conflict.

Your schedule will include holidays and weekends. Most nursing jobs give 2 weeks of vacation and 2 weeks of paid sick time. But you will likely need to request your time off a month or more in advance. You might even be required to find your own coverage to get a vacation approved. Every shift you work will be short staffed because there are never enough nurses to cover all of the positions. You never get paid more for doing the extra work when you are working with fewer nurses. Many facilities mandate in some fashion. This can mean that if there is a call out you can be required to stay past your shift. Or it could mean being required to work overtime. On some of your days off you will also be on-call and required to come in if there is a call out.

The compensation will never feel adequate for everything that you are asked to do. You will start out at $30 an hour when you enter the profession at 20 years old. After working as a nurse for 45 years and retiring at 65 (hopefully) you can look forward to making about $9 more then when you started. Let’s compare the pay growth rate of other professions. The average starting pay for an accountant is $15 and the overall average is $32, giving them a growth of $17. This is more then doubling their starting rate. Computer programmers have an average starting rate of $17 with an overall average of $48, giving them a growth rate of $31. This is again a doubling of their starting rate. Lawyers on average start out at $23 with an overall average of $47, giving them a growth rate of $24. Again, it doubles. Compare that to to meager 1/3 increase that nurses see in their pay. Doesn’t feel like the kind of pay growth you’d expect to see from the highest risk profession in the country.

There are some good things to report.

You would be in one of the highest demanded for jobs in the world. This means that you would have a job security that most professions cannot promise. Having a nursing degree will open up a ton of job options. Nurses are working every where from tech companies to hospitals to court rooms. Unlike many other degrees, you can use this one degree to do any of these things. There is nothing stopping you from changing part way through your career either.

The true gold of nursing is the humanness of it. You will be able to see people be born and see them die. All of humanity at it’s most raw, bare and vulnerable states will be your daily interactions. The connections that you can make with people in these moments is beyond my ability to communicate. It uplifts us to the divine. This little paragraph is the reason that I am still a nurse.

So, should you become a nurse?

For most, I would say no. For the small few who read through this long list of awful things but still read that final paragraph and felt that deep need to help and connect with others, maybe. The rest of this post if for those few.

If you are going to be a nurse, this is my advice:

Before going to nursing school, become a CNA and work in either long term care or medical surgical nursing for 2 years. Be sure that you provide post mortem care at least once. This will give you a great feel for what working in the profession is like without gaining a ton of debt. If you still want to be a nurse after 2 years of being a CNA, then you’re probably going to be ok. Not to mention that it will help you better appreciate and supervise the CNAs you will work with as a nurse.

Always have a plan B. Never let yourself become dependent on your income as a nurse. This minute this happens you will become trapped in the profession and that isn’t good for anyone. Have someone else’s income, a nest egg or another job that you can fall back on if you find that you need to leave nursing. Doesn’t matter if it is a break or a forever kind of departure, you will want to have this ace in your sleeve. Never feel that it is something that you MUST do in order for you or your family to survive. Once that happens you put yourself at risk for some really dangerous outcomes.

Make work life balance a sacred duty. Think of it as something that is as essential as breathing. If you want to avoid many of the negative health consequences that come with nursing, you will need to maintain a healthy balance in your life. That means you only pick up shifts if you are benefitting from it. They will always be short and you can never work enough to solve that problem. Stay focused on the long game. Working 80 hours a week will make you a fried crisp in no time.

Build good boundaries. Find a way to draw an emotional wall between yourself and other people. Do not allow the problems and burdens of others becomes your personal crusades. You will meet and care for literally thousands of people over a nursing career. You cannot save them all. Enmeshing yourself with your patients will make you less capable of helping anyone as you are much more likely to suffer burnout and PTSD. Boundaries are your emotional armor. Without your armor you will not survive.

All that said, I want you to know that I am still a nurse. It is a brutal and unforgiving profession. I have been assaulted. I’ve been injured more then once and will carry the consequences of one of those injuries with me for all my days. I am struggling with PTSD. But despite all of that, I don’t think that I could ever walk away from the profession. I love being a nurse. But there is no way that I can advise that this profession is for most people. It’s not.

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!

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