By now if you know me you know that I have a new job. I’m not going to get into the specifics except to say I’m back in nursing in a hospital setting.

This isn’t about one hospital or the other or what all I think is wrong with health care today, it’s about nursing and the men and women who do it for a living every day.

Nursing has been my profession for 27 years. I graduated from high school barely 17 years old and went straight to nursing school at St. Dominic in Jackson.

For three years I lived with Sr. Maura, a Dominican nun, as my house mother. The woman had the patience of Job and told me more than once I was close to crossing “her” line. To this day I can close my eyes and hear her rosary beads clicking when she was coming down the hall.

To this day my proudest memory of being a student at St. Dominic was the winter of our senior year. We awakened in the dark of the morning being told that due to ice, sleet and power outages many nurses could not report to the hospital for their shift. All senior students were asked to dress and report to the hospital.

We were given a report and assigned our own patients and proceeded to do what we did best. We nursed people. We didn’t answer the phone, enter stuff in the computer or do reams of paperwork. We made rounds with doctors, gave medicines, talked to patients and families; we worked hard and enjoyed every minute of it.

Our charge nurse finally relaxed about having so many students on her floor. We told her not to worry; we would not let her or Sr. Maura down, and we didn’t.

I started work in the emergency room of St. Dominic a week later. I was assigned to the care of a night nurse who scared the hell out of me, if that woman had told me to take myself down Lakeland Drive and jump off the bridge I would have said “Yes ma’am.” For weeks I followed every move she made, learning all the things that are nursing in the real world not in the text books. About four months after I started, one night an ambulance call came in, they were bringing in a “full code,” which at the time meant a person in cardiac arrest. I looked at Susie who usually by this time was in the code room ready for the patient and barking orders at me. She calmly met my gaze and said “this one’s on you honey.”

I ran the code, did the charting and at the end, after sending the patient to ICU and talking to his family, I was about to burst with pride. Susie looked at me and said, “Not bad, get your room cleaned up, never know when the next one’s coming in.” I just laughed. I knew I had made it.

I remember the first time I had to tell a family that someone they loved didn’t make it. Even though I had only known them for a brief unhappy encounter, my heart broke for them, and when I said “I am so sorry” I really meant it.

Nursing isn’t my job, it’s my profession. I’m a professional, some days I’m better than others. Like any profession there are good examples and bad examples. Most of the time your bad examples are just good nurses having a bad day; it’s just that when they have a bad day it affects a lot of people.

And most people don’t want to know that their nurse is a regular human being. They want them to fix whatever is wrong with them or their family member and smile while they do it. When I get out of my office and put my hands on a patient, it reminds me why I picked this profession so many years ago and why I’ve stuck with it for so long.

For me it’s about paying back a profession that has done so much for me over the years, It’s about Sr. Maura and the click of her beads trying to teach a young girl to believe in something bigger than herself.

Nurses are the glue that holds health care together. From the school nurses who check insulin levels at school, to the floor nurse who makes sure your loved one got what they needed, from the surgery nurses who assure you you can close your eyes to the delivery nurses who coaches a new mom through a life changing moment, from the ER nurses who keep calm when your world is falling apart to the home health nurses who go willingly into one more stranger’s house — these and many others are the men and women who are nurses, and I’m proud to be one of them.

Christina Hall writes a weekly column for The Natchez Democrat. She can be reached at christina.hall@natchezdemocrat.com.