02/27/2022
Lynn Murphy Mark
Just the other day a retired nurse friend of mine disclosed that she has decided not to renew her nursing license. She served as a Registered Nurse for decades, like me. Unlike me, she is brave and insightful enough to know that any future work in health care is out of the question. I mean, that is also true for me but I am not courageous enough to let my license lapse.
I have thought about the fact that I have no intention of taking on the responsibility of another career in nursing. I have considered just letting the renewal deadline pass me by. But every time I open a section of my wallet, there is that little paper rectangle naming me a Registered Nurse in the state of Missouri. That license is precious to me.
When I retired from nursing in 2014 my license was active in New Mexico. Within a couple of years Jan and I had moved to Florida. I went through the process of becoming a licensed RN in Florida. Even then I had no intention of working as a nurse since I was now volunteering as an Immigration Specialist – far removed from the halls of a hospital. In 2018 when we moved back to Missouri, I applied for an active RN license and renewed it two years later.
I have been a nurse since 1973 when I graduated from Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing in St. Louis, Missouri. Prior to that I had worked my way through nursing school as a nurse’s aide at Deaconess. Before that I worked as a nurse’s aide at Boone County Hospital in my college town. So from 1968 to 2014 a huge part of my identity was as a health care worker. That’s 46 years of my life, a considerable amount of time.
My mind is full of images from those years. My soul carries the joys and sorrows from those years. My heart is filled with the opportunities that nursing gives to make a real difference in another person’s life, and death. Thousands of people and I have shared some moments or hours of mutual dependency – patients and families looking to me for answers, and me looking to them as sacred teachers in this school of life. I’m not trying to be melodramatic – there is an unbreakable bond of trust between nurses and their patients. It’s a bond that can be forged in minutes, or over the course of days to weeks.
Many times in my life I have been asked to describe myself. Invariably I start with, “I am a nurse.” Although being a mom has been the most important and wonderful part of my life, I am apparently a nurse first when it comes to defining who I am. When my children were born and I was learning the ropes of motherhood, after a short six weeks off I returned to my familiar environment where I mostly knew exactly what I was supposed to do.
Nursing is hardly ever just a job. For me it has been a calling, a vocation, a prayer practice, an opportunity to use my knowledge and intuition to help one person at a time. I have become close friends with some fellow nurses. (My partner, Jan, says nurses belong to our own kind of mafia – we will never leave because we know too much.) Most of my precious friends have been in the trenches with me. Between us we have hours of stories that lead to tears or stories that make us laugh out loud. I treasure these stories. They are woven into the fabric of my life and I am proud to carry them with me wherever I go.