There is a peculiar expectation placed upon people who know how to care for others.
If you understand health, shouldn't you know how to remain healthy? If you understand suffering, shouldn't you know how to endure it? If you teach people about sleep, nutrition, stress, movement, relationships, safety, and healing, shouldn't you be particularly good at managing those things yourself?
And if you are a nurse—someone entrusted with the bodies, fears, families, and sometimes the final moments of other human beings—shouldn't you know how to take care of yourself?
It sounds reasonable. I am no longer convinced that it is.
I write this from the perspective of a nurse because nursing is the profession I know from the inside. But after more than a decade working alongside people across healthcare, I do not believe this tension belongs to nurses alone. The healer may be a nurse, physician, therapist, pharmacist, advanced practice provider, or another person whose work is centered on the health of others. The responsibilities differ, but the paradox is familiar: knowing how to care for human beings does not make the person providing that care any less human.
What the Profession Requires
Nursing has taken me across nearly the entire human lifespan.
I have cared for adults approaching a century of life—people recovering from fractures, surgery, blood loss, illness, and the accumulated vulnerabilities of aging. I have also cared for infants born around 24 weeks' gestation, human beings arriving months before their bodies were expected to encounter the outside world.
The clinical problems could hardly be more different. The fundamental human needs are remarkably similar: oxygenation, nutrition, sleep, temperature, mobility, protection from injury, relief from pain, safety, human connection, a suitable environment, and someone capable of recognizing when something is changing and knowing what to do about it.
Nurses spend their careers learning these things. They also practice within a profession that makes substantial demands on the same human body expected to provide that care.
Long shifts become longer shifts. Many nurses work nights. Some rotate between days and nights, repeatedly asking the body to override one of its most fundamental biological systems: the circadian rhythm.
Sleep can become something negotiated rather than expected. Insomnia and chronic sleep disruption do not disappear because someone understands their physiology. Eating can become similarly distorted; hydration, meals, and even using the bathroom may be postponed until the work permits them.
There is exposure to infectious disease, needles, bodily fluids, unpredictable emergencies, distressed or combative patients, and workplace violence.
COVID-19 did not create the physical vulnerability of healthcare work. It made that vulnerability impossible for the public to ignore.
The Weight You Cannot Measure
Then there is the burden that cannot be placed on a scale.
Sometimes a nurse is responsible for recognizing the narrowing window in which another human being can still be saved.
A nurse may be the first person to recognize deterioration, question an order, identify an error, challenge an assumption, escalate a concern, summon a team, begin resuscitation, or keep asking the same uncomfortable question when the clinical picture does not make sense.
An incorrect order does not become correct because someone with greater institutional authority wrote it. A deteriorating patient does not wait for an organizational chart to determine who is permitted to notice.
So nurses learn a peculiar professional skill: how to carry enormous responsibility while possessing incomplete authority.
And then there are the realities healthcare institutions are less comfortable discussing: bullying, humiliation, sexism, discrimination, groupthink, professional gatekeeping, workplace aggression, threats, and violence.
I know what it is to enter a hospital to care for other human beings and discover that I must also consider whether I am safe among the people working beside me. That changes a person.
And Then We Prescribe Resilience
None of this makes resilience meaningless.
Resilience matters. So do sleep, exercise, nutrition, friendship, therapy, boundaries, prayer, reflection, time away from work, and all the other legitimate practices through which human beings care for themselves.
But resilience becomes something else when it is used to transform a structural problem into an individual responsibility.
You cannot mindfulness your way out of unsafe staffing. You cannot sleep-hygiene your way out of a schedule that repeatedly overturns your circadian rhythm. You cannot resilience-train your way out of workplace violence.
The problem is not necessarily that the nurse has forgotten how to care for himself. Sometimes the nurse understands exactly what is happening.
Nursing Has a Philosophy
That distinction matters because nursing is more than the competent performance of clinical tasks. Nursing is a discipline.
It possesses its own body of knowledge and its own enduring questions: What is health? What does it mean to care? How does environment influence healing? How does a human being adapt to illness? What happens when disease changes someone's relationship with the body, family, community, identity, or future? What does one human being owe another when that person becomes vulnerable?
Generations of nursing scholars have approached these questions differently.
Florence Nightingale emphasized the relationship between health and environment. Dorothea Orem examined self-care and what happens when a person's needs exceed the capacity to meet them independently. Sister Callista Roy developed nursing around adaptation. Jean Watson placed human caring and relationship near the center of nursing's intellectual life.
Their theories are not interchangeable, nor does any single theory explain the whole of nursing. But together they reveal something important about the discipline.
Nursing has developed an extraordinarily expansive understanding of the human person. The biological body matters, but a person cannot be reduced to a biological body.
Environment matters. Relationships matter. Culture matters. Adaptation matters. Meaning matters. Dignity matters.
Nurses have built an entire discipline around understanding these dimensions of human health.
And that creates a remarkable contradiction in modern healthcare.
If environment affects health, then the nurse's environment matters. If relationships affect health, then the relationships surrounding the nurse matter.
If sleep, nutrition, safety, belonging, dignity, adaptation, and human connection matter for our patients, they do not cease to matter when the person wearing the hospital identification badge walks to the other side of the bed.
Physician, Heal Yourself
There is an ancient phrase that has followed me while thinking about all of this.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus recalls a proverb:
“Physician, heal yourself.”
Luke 4:23
Later in Luke's Gospel, as Jesus hangs on the cross, the same challenge returns in a more brutal form:
“He saved others; let him save himself if he is God's Messiah, the Chosen One.”
Luke 23:35
These are different moments, but I cannot escape the parallel.
There is something buried inside that demand: the assumption that possessing knowledge or power in the presence of suffering should somehow make the healer invulnerable to suffering.
Yet the Christian story gives us something very different.
Jesus heals, and Jesus suffers. Jesus consoles, and Jesus weeps. Jesus gives, and Jesus becomes tired.
He touches the sick, feeds the hungry, notices the excluded, and attends to bodies, relationships, communities, grief, faith, and human dignity.
And eventually the healer becomes the wounded one.
His vulnerability does not negate his capacity to heal. It reveals his humanity.
There is something profoundly recognizable to a nurse in that image.
Knowledge does not abolish vulnerability. The physician eventually becomes a patient. The nurse eventually needs a nurse. The therapist eventually needs someone who listens. The caregiver eventually needs care.
So if I could answer that ancient challenge in the language of nursing, perhaps I would answer it this way: