Nurses Week Celebration Poster (Picture).

It's National Nurses Week  in early May.  To all the nurses who struggle through the daily grind day in and day out, a big Happy thank you goes out from the bottom of my heart.  Your job is difficult and complex.  Your expectations and uncertainties are constant.  You have difficult patients and difficult doctors and difficult managers and difficult pharmacists and difficult house cleaning staff and difficult ER dynamics and difficult calculus to figure out.  OK, forget the calculus.  I was just seeing if you were still reading.  You have a lot of responsibility and on top of all that, you are expected to keep a fake smile as best you can so you can grind through the day that seems like it never ends.

You are expected to sell your dignity in the pursuit of patient satisfaction.  Your patient and family is always right, no matter how wrong they are.  You have always events and never events and leave me alone events that are always popping up at the least convenient times.  You have documentation requirements that consume you.  You have communication that escapes you.  You  are placed in the middle of just about all the obnoxious baby sitting crap that happens every day between grown men and women who's husbands and wives would never put up with.   You are over trained and under skilled in many aspects of your job.  You are amazing to me.   For that I am grateful, because I could never do it.  You are appreciated for your training for your hard work and for your dedication.  I just have one question.  I want to know how nurses got a whole  nurses week and us doctors only got  one day.