When Nursing Comes First and What That Costs

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a crisis way. Just a persistent sense that no matter how hard I work, I can no longer do my job in the way I would like to do it. Like many people, I bring work home. I carry unfinished thoughts from one task to the next. I know there are corners I could explore more deeply, ideas I could develop more carefully, if only there were more hours available.

In my twenties, this felt very different, I signed up to every course every lecture or networking group without a thought if I would have the time to do it. I loved frantic all-nighters editing essays. I enjoyed disappearing down academic rabbit holes, reading articles on completely unrelated topics simply because they caught my attention. I could afford to be spontaneous in my learning. Curiosity had space. Creativity had time.

Now, I’m on an efficiency drive.

Reading has to be purposeful. Time has to be justified. The “just for interest” articles fall away first. I stick rigidly to reading lists. Tasks are completed, but the joy of wandering through ideas, of getting lost in thought, is harder to come by. Study becomes transactional rather than exploratory, and something vital is lost in that process.

That loss is one of the reasons my writing matters to me so much.

Writing is the space where I reclaim curiosity. It’s where I allow myself to think sideways again, to follow threads that aren’t strictly necessary but feel important. It’s where I can be reflective rather than efficient. 

When I was younger, I often complained that nursing didn’t fit neatly with youth or with trying to find a partner. Shift work, exhaustion, emotional labour, none of it lent itself easily to dating or spontaneity. At the time, it felt unfair.

Now, I would say something similar about nursing and family life.

I love my work. I love my family. I would not give up either. But I sometimes worry that I never quite give the best of myself to both. There are days when my attention feels divided beyond repair, when everyone gets a tired version of me, competent and present, but stretched thin.

It’s in those moments that I understand, in a very real way, why so many historical nurses lived single lives.

For women like Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell, Lillian Wald, and Mary Seacole, devotion to nursing was not just a career choice. It was a total commitment. Some were actively prevented from marrying by institutional rules. Others appear to have chosen solitude because the work demanded everything they had. There was no room for dilution. No space for divided loyalties.

These women gave their entire beings to nursing.

They reformed systems, built services, led movements, and saved lives, often at immense personal cost. When viewed through the lens of modern family life, their level of dedication feels almost impossible. They were not stronger because they were superhuman, but because they accepted sacrifices that many of us would struggle to make.

I sometimes think they were less fickle than I am. Less torn. More certain in their purpose and that must do something the person’s soul, to be that sure of a purpose.

That doesn’t make my choices wrong. It doesn’t make modern nursing weaker. But it does highlight how much has changed, and how much is now asked of us. Today, we are expected to be exceptional professionals and present parents, curious scholars and efficient workers, creative thinkers and perfectly organised adults.

Something always gives.

Perhaps that is why I’ve chosen to focus this month on fictional nurses and romance. Fiction gives nurses the love stories that real life so often denied them or made nearly impossible. It allows us to imagine tenderness without rules, connection without sacrifice, and devotion that doesn’t demand solitude as its price.

And maybe, in reading and writing those stories, we find permission to be a little gentler with ourselves.  Remembering to have it all, is often fiction.

xSisterSmithx