I want to help people.
“Why did you want to become a nurse?”
Asked this on our first day of nursing school orientation, nothing the answers to those questions will be what we need to keep in our minds, over the next four years. That will be what keeps us going. When shit gets hard, remember why you started.

This is a tattoo my friend Becki's tattoo
(a nursing school bestie, shoutout to UCN, The Pas)
I wish that would have been enough. I wish my desire and passion “to help” wasn’t instead my cross to bear.
My calling to help people started at a young age. I remember putting a band-aid on the knee of one of the kids my mom was babysitting. I couldn’t have been more than eight years old, leading the smaller child to the bathroom where I cleaned up the abrasion with hydrogen peroxide, as my mother had done to me.
Knowing my calm demeaner and confidence of knowing what to do helped this child feel better, must have stirred something in me. My helper and fixer mentality carried through the rest of my life- not just my career, but romantic and personal relationships too.
Ever career quiz I ever took in high school told me I needed to be in the helping field. “Nurse” was always in that list of suggestions.
So when I was in grade 12, my mom was in her second year of her own bachelor’s degree, and I was reading her med-surg textbook, thinking it was so interesting.
Nursing seemed like the right move. I was always interested in psychology, self help (Oprah & Dr. Phil were my favourite TV shows) and the human condition.
It’s a great career, with a good income, pension, benefits, “paid vacation”. It was hard but it was rewarding. It was a well-respected job.
To me, it felt like a calling. “A job not everyone can do.”
But I could.
I would.
And I did, for 13 years,
until I couldn’t.
If you are experiencing signs of burnout, please, reach out for help. Talk to a trusted supervisor, your Employee Assistance Program, myself or someone else about what you are experiencing. Burnout and Vicarious Trauma do not get better on its own.
To determine if you are experiencing burnout or vicarious trauma (or at high risk), take the self assessment here:
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