Inspirational quotes and stories

5. The top 25 inspirational things about nursing

For a nurse, inspiration is as important as breathing—we need oxygen for our souls. Just as we check to see if our patients are breathing, checking our own emotional pulse is essential. We need to feel inspired; it’s a critical component of a nursing career.

For us to keep going shift after shift, we must be reminded from time to time of those special moments—we all have them in our careers—when we’ve stopped and thought: This is why I do it.

So just what are some things that keep a nurse breathing? The following are presented randomly, not in any particular order of importance. All of them, however, provide oxygen for our souls!

• Passion: Recollection of what called us to nursing in the first place. Our initiative to continue education, join a committee at our workplace, volunteer in our community at a health event and stay fervently committed to quality patient care. It’s contagious!
• Respect: For our profession. For human life. For dignity’s sake we undertake enormous responsibility.
• Humor: It’s a well-known fact that laughter is great medicine for our patients and for us! A colleague once boasted of eating an entire Thanksgiving dinner in six minutes while standing up during a busy ER shift! Then there are certain things that we find comical (perhaps even hysterical) that only another nurse would understand!

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