T o th e Penn community:
We don’t mean to compla in. Just because we are kind, caring people that have dedicated our lives to serving others in their greatest time of need doesn’t mean that we don’t have a sense of humor. We can take a joke. But the recent shoutout about us (“To the Penn nurses: A two-year associates degree will get you the same job. But keep talking about those clinicals like they mean something”) hurt our feelings a little more than usual. It was, as they say, the final straw. As the senior class, we’ve been picked on for four years now, and we’re over it. We feel we have a responsibility to speak up, and now is our last chance.
First, a little education, since it appears that Penn didn’t cover everything for you: Education is just one of the many things that nurses do when they’re not doing nothing. It is quite clear that most college students have no idea what it is nurses do, which means that you and your family are fortunate enough to have avoided serious illness. Congratulations! We’re very proud of you.
Unfortunately, the day will come when you or your loved ones will be seriously ill. They will be admitted to a hospital where all of your pre-med friends who became physicians won’t pay any attention to you. That means that someone like the lowly nurse will have to answer your questions, attend to all your needs — and we know you guys sure are needy! — and help you maintain an ounce of dignity when you soil the bed and we are the ones cleaning you up.
We will do all of those things, and then some. We will administer lots of medications and explain what they are for, what the side effects are and make sure you can take them as prescribed. If the medication is something like a chemotherapy drug, we will get specially certified to administer it because of its toxicity and specific administration guidelines. We will monitor the electrical activity in your heart so that when you suddenly go into an unstable rhythm, we can assess why and intervene. We will insert peripheral and central intravenous lines into your veins so that you can obtain necessary medication therapies. We will control dialysis machines that filter the contents of your blood and then return them back to you when your kidneys don’t work. We will insert nasogastric tubes down your nose and into your stomach when you drink so much alcohol that it has to be removed from your body or when your gastrointestinal system is not functioning and you must be fed formula through a tube. We will clean out your wounds — so deep you can see the bone — pack them with gauze and then cover them up nicely so you don’t have to see. We will listen to your lungs with our stethoscopes and tell your doctors that you have crackles throughout, and we suspect an aspiration pneumonia: We will be right. We will help you get out of bed and stand up, when moving seems impossible. We will hold your hand when you are in pain and you have no friends or family there to comfort you. We will listen to you when you want to tell us about your life before you were sick.
Of course, if you had no idea what a nurse did, we can’t expect you to know what a nursing curriculum is like, either. Let us enlighten you. We took chemistry, microbiology, anatomy and physiology, human development, research methodology, medical-surgical, geriatric, pediatric and women’s health nursing — to name a few — and then all of the same sector requirements everyone else has (yes, we took a writing seminar, and a math and an arts and letters, etc.). We took exams like every other student, we wrote papers like every other student, we did presentations like every other student and we had labs like every other (science) student. We also had anywhere from six to 16 hours of clinical per week in addition to regular classes.
It is true that you can become a registered nurse with an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree. We’re glad you Googled something about nursing besides a sexy Halloween costume. What you didn’t research is anything else — like the fact that BSN nurses have better patient outcomes than AD nurses (that research was done by Penn Nursing scholars, by the way), how more hospitals are requiring their nurses to get bachelor’s degrees or the importance of advanced practice nursing in health care today (who prescribes your birth control at student health?), which is limited to RNs who have a BSN and then go on to get a master’s degree, Ph.D. or DNP (Doctorate of Nursing Practice).
You can make every inappropriate nurse joke out there — we’ve heard them all — but please do not disrespect our clinical experiences, which are undeniably more profound than any average undergraduate education. Perhaps you think that we simply want to complain about waking up early in the morning. Well sometimes we do, because it is difficult to listen to you talk about your “early” 9 a.m. class when we have been up since 5:30 a.m. But usually we just want to convey what our day was like while we were at clinical and you were sleeping in.
We want to tell you what it feels like to hug the spouse of a dying patient or to watch a mother try to comfort a sick child in pain. You cannot compare your academic stresses to the kind of suffering we are exposed to on a weekly basis.
You should be so lucky as to encounter and be cared for by one of us. After all, we have received the same Ivy League education as you and worked just as hard to get through it. We will be experts in our field, just like you will be in yours. Next time you meet a nursing student, or a nurse, ask them about what they do, and ask yourself if you could do that for a living. If you think you could, maybe you should spend a day with us and reconsider your major. We’re not the most trusted profession year after year for nothing. We’re just better people than you are (oops, we said it).
Yours in sickness and in health,
Nora Casper and members of the Penn Nursing Class of 2014
