What It Means to Be a Nurse | Yoko Sato (Dean, Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care)
July 20, 2007
The spring semester is coming to a close, and it's now the final exam season. The students are facing a challenging time before the long summer break. Keep up the great work, everyone!
This spring semester, I taught "Fundamentals of Nursing" to first-year students. At the end of the course, I was asked to speak about my own thoughts on nursing, which was quite a difficult task. The nursing profession is often avoided, being described with words like "demanding" and "dirty." I struggled a bit with what and how I should speak so that students could choose this profession with pride and hope.
My professional life began in a pediatric ward, and among the children I met there, there are several whose faces and stories I can still vividly recall more than 40 years later. A child with acute leukemia grew thinner and thinner, their small body wasting away, while in contrast, only their eyes seemed to grow larger. When they stared at me with those eyes, I felt a sense of solemnity, as if this child, though only three years old, understood that the flame of their life was about to burn out. A child with diabetes, not yet five years old, would avert their gaze to avoid seeing the child next to them eating pudding. Their posture, enduring with a clear understanding of their fate, showed something that, despite their youth, did not allow for the cheap sentimentality of adults. In the adult ward, too, I encountered a gaze that is seared into my memory and I can never forget. It was from a person with terminal cancer who had not been informed of their condition. They were lying in a bed by the hallway in a six-bed room. When I met their gaze as they watched me pass by in the hallway from their bed, a bed that even the nurses had begun to approach less frequently, I was a young nurse unable to respond.
I believe that working as a nurse means carrying the unforgettable gazes of several people in your heart, spending your time learning, prompted by those very gazes. This kind of self-development must not be an abstract concept like culture or humanity, but must be expressed concretely in the skill of the hands you extend toward people. This is because nursing is practice.
Therefore, I want you to do your best now, during your student years, when it is time to learn, to firmly acquire the knowledge, skills, and the gaze you should direct toward people. I believe you can do it.
(Posted on: July 20, 2007)