What was the road to hell paved with again?

Choosing to be a nurse puts one in good, but lonely, company. There a lot of us, but people seem to in the dark about what it means to be a nurse. I have seen polls that indicate that nurses are some of the most trusted people in western society. In one poll, we were rated more trustworthy than clergy (though that may not be saying much lately). But at the same time, being a nurse doesn't garner the same type of respect that I believe it should. People trust us, but I'm not sure they really believe that we're that bright. (Did anyone else see the "naughty nurse" Halloween costumes this year? Yuck.) I'm not someone who wants to place nursing on a pedestal either. We aren't angels; we aren't there to be pretty and "brighten up" a patient's room; we aren't anyone's handmaiden anymore. That certainly hasn't been our role for years.

Being a nurse-scientist is in some ways even worse. It just seems to just confuse the hell out of people. In our philosophy class this quarter, we have asked some hard questions about nursing. We have asked if it is a profession, if it is a real science, if we are scientists and what all of that means. These are questions that seem to put some of my wonderful classmates on the defensive. I feel that these are questions that we, as nurses, must be willing to ask and consider. They are important.

My readers (if I actually have any!) may be wondering what brought this contemplation on tonight. As I was sitting tonight with another student in my cohort, I realized that even though she and I are very different people, we had immediate common ground. We are nurses. But I couldn't actually define why that binds us. We work in different specialties, we are different ages, and we want to do very different research. So what does it mean to be a nurse and why does it bind us? Does it mean that we're more touchy-feely? Does it mean that all of our research must be qualitative, that we only want to talk about feelings? Does it mean that we're less competitive among ourselves and more able to be real friends?

Within the last two weeks I have had three troubling experiences. During my brief visit home, my father asked me what I was "majoring in." I was stunned by the question. My father has a master's degree. And he is aware that I have a BSN and my MS. How does my father not understand what a nursing PhD is? Also, a close family friend, asked me how medical school was going. I was also taken aback by this as I've talked with him about the PhD prior to applying! Both times I tried to quickly do some education and well, explanation, but I'm not sure that either my friend or my father understood.

Perhaps the most upsetting incident occurred at my fellowship meeting. At the meeting, another student, while pointing (manners, people, manners), asked "I want to be a scientist, what is that you want to be?" I was so startled that I hesitated, and the director dragged the conversation in another direction before I could respond.

So I want to answer the question now. I want to be a scientist too. I'm reading philosophy of science, journal articles, taking methods courses, writing, writing, writing and hoping to be published. But will that make me a scientist when nursing is, and will always be, only a human science?

I think so. But I also know that nursing science is still earning respect. Nursing science is still young. It is a science that is made up almost entirely of women. It is a science that addresses amorphous things like quality of life and un-glamorous things like pain relief and medication adherence. It is a science that asks the un-fun questions, things like are our patients actually satisfied with their care? It is not a well-paid science. We are not the superstars of the biological sciences. But when I read our journals (Do doctors read them? Do they know how important some of the things we write are?) I know that we "do" science. And that it is interesting, important science.

What binds nurses is that sometimes we alone actually know what we do. I can sit across the table from another nurse and "know" something about her without knowing much about her at all. What makes us different, perhaps, from doctors or judges or astrophysicists, isn't that we weren't smart enough to get into those programs (and yes, I've had someone say, "you seem smart enough to have gotten into medical school, what happened?"), but instead that we are willing to do the unrecognized, dirty, sometimes disheartening work because we think it is important. And that we are able to create meaning from it. Maybe that is our science.

I am not advocating that we  become defensive and I really want to STOP having the nurses-as-angels phenomenon. That pedestal was only a gilded cage. I am advocating instead that we continue answering, describing, and demonstrating what we do. Even when we are sick of talking about it. If you are a nurse, tell someone what you do all day, not only the good or bad things, but the real things. Make friends with a doctor. They need to see us as people and they need to know what we do and what our science says too!

What I really ask of any nurse reading this is that you stop and think. Think about why you do what you do. If what you do is science and why. Think about how you know what you know. Think about why you didn't go to medical school. Don't be caught off guard the next time someone asks you an important question about nursing. Instead, please take the opportunity to define nursing, for yourself, and for someone else.

Do this for me. So that nobody asks me how medical school is going ever again....