Today I am feeling totally discouraged by the value placed in nursing care. 

It all started when I set out to find someone to get our garden looking ok again. It's not landscape work I need, just some weeding and general tidying up. I'm talking a few hours manual labour. It's not that we can't do it ourselves, we're just so busy with work/kinder/study/life in general and to be honest, it's not really our thing. We're not good with gardens and don't have the greenest of thumbs.. right Jeremy?.. if you're reading this! 

But, it looking nice (enough) is important to me. So much so that I'm very much willing to pay to get it done. I've had a couple of quotes and to my surprise, none are less than $35 an hour with the average being quite a bit higher (cash in hand). Call me crazy, but I was hoping to pay about $20 an hour. Why, because this is around what I earn and my logic was that I'd go off to work to do what I know how to do well and I'd pay the same amount for someone to do for me what they do well.

If I were seeking a highly experienced, trained, super-dooper garden specialist then maybe, just maybe, I'd get it. But I'm not, and therefore I don't. If I'm honest, it upsets me to think that it's cheaper for me to NOT work a day and attempt the garden myself than to pay somebody else. I don't even want it to be cheaper. Just on par would be nice.

Here's why I don't get it - how can it be so that a nurse earns less than a gardener? And it's not just gardens. I started asking around and it's the norm to pay this amount for anything house related.
Why is being a nurse be so undervalued? Our government and private sector see it appropriate to pay a nurse so poorly that an oak tree is more expensive to care for than their children, or their parents, or any loved one. I don't even have an oak tree, but I'm sure you get my point. 

I AM NOT saying that a gardener, or a painter, or a builder, or anyone who undertakes manual work of any kind of less qualified or deserving than a nurse. I promise you that. These jobs are also important and the people who do them work incredibly hard. But is being a nurse not worth at least an equal amount? My point is not that a gardener be paid less, simply that a nurse be paid as much.

I am someone who feels such passion for nursing. I can't even explain in words how much I love being a nurse. As dorky as it sounds, I feel as if I had a calling. It's as if God (or maybe Florence, standing over me with an oil lamp) spoke to me as a small girl and called me to the sisterhood (and yes, I can say sisterhood even though there are indeed male nurses.. the term Sister applies to both!). 

I take this job so seriously and I can't ever imagine loving another profession quite as much. BUT... people in power, those who control our Government, when are you going to stop taking such risks? You lose those of us that love what we do on a daily basis. It's been happening for years and the result is a whole lot of people working in a hospital doing a job they don't love - and it shows. The best nurses leave (a lot).

I go to work, with pride I might add, to wipe the bottoms of people like your mother who might have had a terrible reaction to chemo that will save their lives, I hold their hands and answer their questions about what will happen if and when they die (unspoken but clear to us both that it's a when and not an if), I tuck your children into bed and rub their backs when they are crying in pain, I hold the hands of your husbands as I reassure them that it's totally normal, and totally ok, to wet the bed (and then I clean it all up). These are not complaints, simply observations. I wouldn't change what I do for the world. Nursing the people other people love, is a great honour.

BUT, I suppose I'd like to be as valued as someone who weeds my garden. Money talks. I wish nurses would get paid a little more. That's all.