Not All Nurses Wear Scrubs: Taking Risks and Making a Life in Canadian Nursing
There is a kind of story about nursing careers that gets told in recruitment videos and in popular media (I'm looking at you Instagram). In TV and movies it usually looks like this: nursing, bedside story. Fade in: a nurse in scrubs orbits the main character (often a physician), appears in key moments of drama, then dissolves back into the background when the plot moves on. Even when nurses are centered, as with Nurse Jackie (a series about an expert ED nurse whose life is tangled in addiction) the story leans on extremes, as if a nurse can only be a main character by being spectacularly broken. In contrast, the careers that actually sustain nurses in Canada are far quieter and far more radical. They double back. They stall. They are rerouted by grief, by curiosity, by political awakening. They are shaped by patients who stay with us and by systems that both constrain and invite our courage. My own career trajectory, in acute mental health and substance use inpatient work, then cli...