Writing and nursing: An unlikely Nightingale

Like many of us, I find writing is a natural way to process thoughts about practice. Recently, I wrote a novel, which I tend to say is about school nursing, but is really about other things besides; life, death and our love for one another, in each ordinary day.

Writing always came easily. Nursing, I never thought would.

I wonder if others of us continue to feel surprised by nursing? I was the dreaming teen who loved music and poetry, felt kindly disposed to my fellow humans, but was not aware of an early burning desire to nurse. At 18 I was not sure what I wanted to do, or even quite who I was. But nursing took me and nursing gently shaped and influenced me, as it did all of us. Nursing stuck. And now, in my fifties, I find myself in a job which makes sense of all that went before. I know that writing about nursing matters. I know we can write to influence. I feel a huge debt of gratitude. And I find myself passionate about our profession, to a degree inconceivable when I set out.