A few months ago, I received an email from a former student who wanted to share some news: after 8 years as a staff nurse on a medical-surgical unit, a remarkable tenure these days, she had just transferred to a different unit. Her message read, “Look what I found on my med cart!” Attached was a photograph of a sticker affixed to the upper-right corner of the medication cart, bearing the words: “Start with what you know – Fidel Lim.” Apparently, someone on her new unit had immortalized one of my oft-repeated teaching mantras, which I use when scaffolding students’ learning. Another one I’m fond of repeating: “When you don’t know what to do, wash your hands. It gives you 20 seconds to think.”
I share this anecdote not to flatter myself, but to reflect on how gratitude cultivates humility. It reminds me that I’m a beneficiary of other people’s generosity and that whatever influence I may have had on others is rarely mine alone to claim. I only wish I knew who created that sticker so I could personally thank the nurse, whom I suspect may be another former student. So, whoever you are, thank you for making my day!
Thanking the underappreciated
Nurses across practice settings are routinely recognized through DAISY Awards, Nurses Week celebrations, professional distinctions such as fellowships, and countless other honors. There are so many award-giving bodies these days that one might wonder whether nursing is approaching award oversaturation, perhaps even an award mill. Recognition is certainly welcome, but it also raises a question: Who are the people behind the nurses we celebrate?
Years ago, an assistant nurse manager where I worked quipped, “Behind every successful physician is a tired old nurse.” That made me wonder: Who stands behind every successful bedside nurse? In my experience, the answer includes hardworking nursing assistants, physical therapists, social workers, volunteers, family members, and, most importantly, the patients themselves, whose trust and determination to take part in their care make nursing meaningful.
The same question applies to nursing academia: Who stands behind every accomplished faculty? Certainly, there are administrative assistants who keep things running, supportive leaders and cheerleaders who create opportunities, colleagues and collaborators who share the workload, generous alumni who give back, and, if I dare say, artificial intelligence, which occasionally helps us get through the day (or a publication). And, best of all, there are students whose thoughtfulness and gratitude give us reasons to keep doing our best.
Perhaps gratitude isn’t simply about recognizing those who stand in the spotlight. It’s also about remembering those who work quietly behind the scenes, frequently without applause. No nurse, educator, or professional succeeds entirely on their own. Our accomplishments are, in many ways, collective achievements. And Thanksgiving offers a fitting reminder to acknowledge the people who helped make them possible.
The gift of being needed
There’s something profoundly meaningful about being entrusted with another person’s vulnerability. Nursing is one of the few professions in which strangers welcome us into some of the most intimate and uncertain moments of their lives. We help patients bathe, eat, breathe, recover, heal, die, and sometimes simply endure. Being needed isn’t always convenient. It can be exhausting and emotionally demanding. But it’s also an extraordinary privilege. We can acknowledge fatigue, disappointment, moral distress, and grief while remaining grateful for the reciprocal and recurring opportunity to make a difference.
If the healthcare system were a human body, nurses would be its capillaries, the tiny but indispensable vessels that connect arteries and veins to the tissues that need them most. Although healthcare’s major vessels may represent its institutions, leadership, and infrastructure, nurses make sure that the good reaches the patient: oxygen, medications, nourishment, comfort, and compassion. They also remove the bad, buffering pain and suffering and preventing harm that threaten healing and recovery. Like capillaries, nurses make the healthcare system function at the point where it matters most. They’re the human interface between health and care.
Aspirational gratitude
A reassuring side effect of gratitude, beyond its potential to make us happier, healthier, and perhaps even longer-lived, is that it allows us to imagine that things will get better and that there’s a peaceful destination at the end of all pilgrimages. Gratitude, in this sense, is not merely an appreciation of what has been; it’s also an expression of hope for what might be. I think about this in my own ongoing pursuit of “becoming”—to stand on someone’s shoulder without crushing them. I aspire to be an antidote, not a toxin, wherever I find myself. And I imagine contributing to a place that resembles the one described in a poem attributed to American hymn composer Charles Austin Miles:
A little more kindness and a little less greed;
A little more giving and a little less need;
A little more smile and a little less frown;
A little less kicking a man when he’s down;
A little more ‘we’ and a little less ‘I’;
A little more laughs and a little less cry;
A little more flowers on the pathway of life;
And fewer on graves at the end of the strife.
Perhaps this is what aspirational gratitude looks like—allowing our appreciation of others to inspire us to become the kind of people others can be grateful for. If we look into the hearts of nurses, and, for that matter, anyone who’s done something meaningful for the good of others, we’ll find the handprints of the many people who’ve touched, shaped, and elevated those hearts. And if we can’t see those handprints, perhaps it’s because those hands have been freed to applaud. That, too, is something to be grateful for.
Fidelindo Lim, DNP, CCRN is a Clinical Professor at New York University Meyers College of Nursing.
