We Need To Start Taking Care Of Ourselves

Nurses Week 2017: Year of the Healthy Nurse (Balance of Mind, Body, and Spirit) as ANA calls it. News Flash: We need to start taking care of ourselves. No more starving or stealing sugary orange juice from the pantry and calling it a meal. Those bottles of Ensure from the kitchen do not count, either. I don’t want to hear, “I don’t have time!” because eating healthy and exercising as a nurse can be difficult, BUT it can be done.

I am sure you or others have heard or said the following more than once: “I just didn’t have time to eat during my shift, all of my patients had C. Diff!” or “Why do my patients decide to start sundowning when I am about to eat?” The list goes on and on with the excuses we use to justify why we are not taking care of ourselves, and meanwhile we tell our patients to live a healthier lifestyle: “Stop smoking!”, “Sir, you can’t eat cream cheese out of the tub with a spoon, that is not healthy!” and “Eat your vegetables, you need to eat to get better!”

It sounds like we are hypocrites, rarely heeding our own advice. Not to mention, the “holding in our urine and bowel movements” dilemma is for another article. I think our pelvic floor muscles are strong enough to withstand some bladder distension and even an enema to fix our fecal impaction.