Back to the bedside - A broken promise.

I never imagined I'd find myself back at the bedside in nursing!

After COVID, enduring long-term disability, and receiving a PTSD diagnosis, I declared with conviction: I'd never return to a system that felt exploitative—one that pushes nurses to their limits, despite them being the backbone of healthcare.

It wasn't just a career choice. It was about survival.

What I struggled with was the contradiction at the core of the profession I adored:

nurses holding the entire healthcare system together while being asked to bear unsustainable emotional, physical, and spiritual burdens. There's a point where “resilience” stops being a strength and starts becoming a silent expectation to endure harm.

For me, that line had been crossed.

And then life took unexpected turns!

Post-COVID, I returned to a world that seemed familiar on the surface but felt fundamentally different underneath. My family structure shifted through divorce. My children were stepping into college life and subsequent independence. The roles I had built my identity around were dissolving and reforming at the same time. I was no longer the same person who had left the bedside—and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

During this period, I had the opportunity—supported through the work of the American Nurses Association—to listen deeply to other nurses. Not in passing. Not in hallway conversations. But in the kind of listening where truth finally has space to surface.

What I heard transformed me.

Hundreds of nurses echoed similar sentiments in different words: exhaustion beyond fatigue, moral distress solidified into grief, and an immense emotional burden often unseen. Some shared thoughts they had never voiced before. There was a quiet, painful undercurrent of nurses striving to function while carrying overwhelming, sometimes dangerous, internal experiences.

What became undeniable was this:

nurses are in trouble, and they are often in it alone.

Not because they don’t care. But because nurses are trained to be the ones who hold others, not the ones who ask to be held.

And yet, beneath that silence, there was something else I kept witnessing—an unwavering commitment to patients, even at personal cost. That paradox is what makes this profession both extraordinary and deeply vulnerable.

It was in listening that I began to understand something I had resisted before:

I didn’t want to leave nurses behind in a system that has no intention of caring for them. I didn’t want my own injury to become a wall between me and the people who understand it most intimately.

So I came back. Not in the same way I left. Not with the same expectations of what the system should give me in return.

I came back with something different:

boundaries I didn’t have before,

language for what was once unspoken, and

a commitment to supporting the mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing of nurses as part of care—not as an afterthought to it.

Because what I know now is this:

Nurses don’t need better staffing ratios or safer workflows—though those matter. Nurses need spaces where their internal experience is acknowledged. Where the weight they carry is not normalized to the point of invisibility. Where asking for support is not treated as weakness, but as professional sustainability.

And they need to know they are not alone in what they are carrying.

My return to the bedside was not a return to who I was before. It is a return with a different purpose: to stand beside nurses in a system that is still learning how to hold them, and to help create pathways where healing is not separate from practice.

Because I don’t believe nurses are meant to simply endure the system.

I believe they are meant to be supported within it.