Today marks one year as a nurse. It’s hard to wrap my head around all that has happened, but I’ll try. This year is remembered in moments to me, little bits of feelings and events- small, ordinary, fleeting. Holding the hand of my dying patient, while describing the sunset out her west-facing hospital room. Trying to make a man smile, the doctor now turned patient, with only a few weeks left to live. Walking in Christmas morning to find that my first primary patient had died. Crying...in the bathroom at work, on the floor of my kitchen, in my car after my shift countless times, wrestling with the volume of loss that I’ve seen so soon into my career. Hugging a patient as she cried, urging her to believe me when I told her I cared so much about her. Hearing my patient say to a colleague, “As long as I’m with Adrienne, I’ll be alright.” Or being called an angel by a man who was recently released from prison, forcing me to fight back tears at his bedside as I wondered how a person so wronged could still find such beauty at the end of all things.

I will never be a first year nurse again, and for many, many reasons I am grateful for this fact. And though this year may have been more difficult than expected, the pandemic has made a powerful impact on me. Accepting limitations, taking leaps of faith, trusting those around me, making real life nursing decisions on my own...Covid propelled me into bigger, messier lessons of caring for humans than I would have expected. No longer were my biggest concerns that of asking how to draw up meds or how to program the IV pump. My concerns shifted, becoming wider as I questioned why the demographics of my Covid patients were so vastly different than my oncology ones, why similar preexisting conditions were being seen time and time again, how systemic racism was so evident in healthcare. For this, I am grateful to have been a nurse during the pandemic, to experience firsthand the problems others only speak of.

I have learned much in this year, more than I can even try to write down. This is just the beginning, in many ways I suppose, but for now, I find hope for carrying on through the power of teamwork, from the ability of humans to adapt and change, and from the grit of an everyday nurse, like me, willing to step up and do some good for patients.