[LEMONS] 4.24.2002
Nurses
Harper is a nurse. I get to see a lot of the back end of nursing. The things you don't think about. The things that you probably should think about. It's a cliche, but... Nurses are overworked, and underpaid. Harper is a fucking hero. All of society is better for what she does.Nurses are the frontline of the medical profession. Nurses are the primary caregivers in hospitals, and make more decisions about patients medical conditions and treatments than any other employee. When you or I fuck up at our jobs, the negative consequences typically aren't that severe. If Harper fucks up, children die. Even when she does everything right, children die. That's what she deals with at work. That's so impossibly hard I can't even imagine it. I couldn't handle it. Yet she does. She's 26. And she certainly isn't in it for the money.
People do die in hospitals. Every day. And when they do, more than anyone else, it is the nurse who is there to deal with the family. For patients, nurses can mean the difference between life and death. For hospitals, they can mean the difference between a lawsuit or not. Nurses ought to be paid more, and they damn sure should have lower nurse to patient ratios. The current state of affairs is criminal, and that there is a massive nationwide nursing shortage is hardly surprising.
But above and beyond everything else, nurses deserve our thanks. They are like teachers, firefighters and EMTs. Society utterly depends on them. Yet they are compensated very poorly for what they do. Knowing what kind of things nurses do, and how little they are paid for it, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me.
And it should scare you too. Really.
You and I can't do diddly squat about nurse to patient ratios, or how much nurses are paid. But we can thank them. The next time you're in the hospital, or a doctor's office, or you just meet a nurse at a party, please tell them thanks for shouldering society's burdon.
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