Why I love my job.

What do I love about being a pediatric oncology nurse? First and foremost the kids! I am inspired by their strength and courage every day.

Work is like another family to me. Oncology is different, our kids aren’t short stays at the hospital, some of them are there for months at a time. I have the opportunity to build lasting relationships with kids and their families. I am there to give them their chemotherapy, watch them battle through the nausea and fatigue and everything else that goes with chemotherapy, but I’m also there to celebrate recovering blood counts, birthdays, and sometimes even the arrival of new baby siblings! I get to watch a mini hockey game between a child and his grandfather in the hospitals hallway and I get to keep score. I even get to see Santa and his reindeer deliver gifts on Christmas Eve and see the trail of cookie crumbs and carrot bits leftover from what the kids had left outside their rooms!

I love that these families, unknowingly, keep me humble and remind me of what is really important. I am blown away that somehow these kids and families make the best of every situation, and normalize life in the hospital. Vitals every 4 hours, medication after medication, bloodwork every day at 4am. Test after test, procedure after procedure, and no matter what, you’ll always see a smile on that child’s face, maybe not that day, maybe not that week, but you’ll see it soon enough!

I love the sense of community that exists at work. Families come together, find strength in each others stories and struggles. The unit is like a little cul-de-sac, and every room is a house. Kids still nock on each others doors to come play and they still ride their tricycles around the unit, with speed limits enforced of course!

Most of all, I love that I get to share all of these experience, the good, the bad, the happy and the sad with incredible nurses. People sometimes wonder why nurses are “clicky”, we share a lot in a 12 hour shift together you know, we couldn’t run a hospital without such strong teamwork! No to mention it may be one of the only jobs where talking about bowels at any given time is completely acceptable!