My thoughts on this

I once watched two newly qualified emergency nurses, fresh from their trauma induction, waiting for their first trauma call. They were excited and enthusiastic, prepping the room merrily, checking the equipment, sharing nervous laughter as they pieced together the fragmented story from the pre-alert.

A senior nurse overheard and sharply reminded them, “This is someone’s family member you’re talking about, you shouldn’t be happy.” The room fell silent. The anticipation, the curiosity, even the light in their faces faded. For the next fifteen minutes, they waited in tense quiet. When the patient arrived, the two new nurses hardly spoke. Their enthusiasm was replaced by guilt, an emotion that stifled their ability to focus, learn, or grow.

Later, when things had calmed, an experienced charge nurse joined them as they cleaned up. Without judgement, he said, “it’s okay to be excited when a trauma’s coming in. We spend years training for this very scenario, we get to actually use those skills to save people lives.  That is something worth getting excited about”

In that simple reassurance, everything brightened. The junior nurses exhaled, and a heavy weight lifted. Their emotions were validated, recognised as the normal nurses response of professionals who care deeply.

There is a time and a place for every emotion, and often, that place is among your colleagues.  The ones who normal get it.  Nursing often asks us to carry things that most people will never see, never imagine. To survive it, we find joy where we can. Sometimes it’s in humour that outsiders might find strange, sometimes in laughter after the hardest shift, sometimes in the quiet excitement of being ready to help.

Joy in nursing isn’t ignorance of suffering, it’s defiance of it. It’s the human spirit’s quiet rebellion, a way of saying: “I will not let this darkness take everything.” We laugh not because it’s funny, but because it helps us stay whole. It’s how we bond, how we heal, and how we keep showing up again and again.