SEVEN REASONS TO QUIT NURSING
1. Because you have a dying mother or a favorite aunt with Alzheimer's, or a friend in Vermont facing chemo alone, and you, nurse, could be cook, house-cleaner, childcare provider, and bringer of hope, happiness, and health.2. Because you want to return to school full time to get your degree (perhaps in art history but preferably your BSN), which will undoubtedly make you a more well-rounded person, not to mention a much better nurse.
3. Because your kids are growing up fast and this may be the last chance you'll have to take them to Disneyland or drive them to the Grand Canyon (and though you may lose your hard-earned seniority, and even your job, you'll never regret it). Besides you can always find another job; after all, you are a nurse.
4. Because you dread going to work each morning (or afternoon, or night); because you tell everyone how much you hate it; because you cry way too often; because you take a shot of vodka from your flask to face going on duty; because your annual reviews are awful (yes your supervisor is a witch and staffing stinks); because you laughed bitterly at your niece when she announced she was going to nursing school; because you told her it would be the biggest mistake of her life.
5. Because you want to give a year to Doctors Without Borders, or two years to the Peace Corps, or two weeks to host a Fresh Air Fund kid from Brooklyn, or 18 months to help start a maternal-child care clinic in New Mexico or New Guinea.
6. Because you want to become a kindergarten teacher, or the senator from California. Because you want to become a parent or an astronaut or you want to finish your thesis, your novel, your house. Because there's something you've always wanted to do, so why not do it now?
7. Because you can't keep up with the advancing technology or stomach the bloated bureaucracy. Because you can't stop beating yourself up over that undiscovered med error or the patient you triaged to the waiting room who coded there. Because you're just bone-tired, and your body can't do it anymore.
So quit. But know this: No matter what you do you'll still be a nurse. You'll stop at every auto accident, drop whatever you're doing when someone screams, and proudly spend hours on the phone with anyone who needs the help of a nurse. So although you won't have stopped a war or cured AIDS in your time as a nurse, you will have fought against pain and disease. And when death arrived at a patient's bedside, you met it with intelligence, compassion and understanding; a smile; a hand held just for a moment, for all eternity. Your nursing career started one day, perhaps recently, perhaps long ago. And it will end one day, too. But your work as a nurse will live on in every patient you ever cared for - even if you become a senator.
~ Thomas Schwartz, RN, LNC
Schwartz, Thomas, RN, LNC, Viewpoint - Seven Reasons to Quit Nursing, American Journal of Nursing, August 1999, Volume 99, Number 8, Page 9.
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