Not a day goes by that I don’t get an email from a certain hospital extolling the nursing supervisory positions that are available for me to consider. I get at least one email, sometimes two. One day they broke the record and sent me four. And the jobs come with sign-on bonuses, $10,000 dollars, $15,000, more.

I was at the dentist one day checking my email while I waited for her to come to my exam room. When she walked in, I held up my phone to show her the screen. She peered at it wondering what was up.

“$20,000!” I said, “Just to go work for them.”

She pulled up a stool and sat next to me. “Imagine,” she said, “how hard that job must be if they’re offering that much.”

I didn’t have to imagine. I’ve been there, and done that. Past tense. I haven’t practiced in over a decade and I finally let my license lapse two years ago. It took me a while to completely let go and accept that that part of my life was over.

They must know my license is not active. I suppose they figure I can reactivate it. And there’s probably still refresher courses and long orientations to the job. But how to reactivate my feet to pull thirteen-hour days with no lunch and barely any potty breaks.

But all that doesn’t worry me because I’m not going to do it. Those days are done for me. What worries me is what it all means. What it all points to: A lack of nurses.

Nursing care is why you get admitted to the hospital. Just about everything else can be done outpatient, labs, x-rays, nuclear med, etc., even some surgeries. They can open all the ICU beds they want but without ICU nurses those beds cannot be filled. There not being enough nurses is a scary, scary thought.

I graduated at the height of one nursing shortage in 1980. I had a job lined up two months before graduation. I’d decided to go back home to Texas and sent feelers out to several hospitals in different parts of the state. They all responded with offers of perks and freebies of all kinds. But the palm trees of Galveston captivated my eyes. They reminded me of the palm trees of my home in The Valley.

I went there and faced the streetcar named Reality Shock head on. That first year was sink or swim. I swam and it made me into what I remain, still in my heart, an ICU nurse. But the nurses I have the most respect for, of all the disciplines, are pediatric oncology nurses. My God, their fortitude. They are angels walking this earth.

So when I see that our number is decreasing once again, I worry. I worry because we need them. Because they are indispensable. They see us on the way in and they see us on the way out. And in-between, they keep us as healthy as is humanly possible.

They spend all day and all night with us in the hospital, allaying our fears, answering our questions, holding our hand when the terrors strike, and even covering our loved one with a warm blanket when they collapse in the visitor’s chair out of exhaustion in the cold of night.

My graduation picture as I look toward the future. As students, we wore the stripe up one side of the cap. Upon meeting all grad requirements we got to wear the stripe around the cap. My cap is long lost. I never wore it in the real world.

Awash in the possibilities awaiting me, on the shores of Galveston Island.

Y’all take care, now.