The ratios are off. Sometimes it feels like you’re a lone shark in a tank full of sting rays, out numbering you drastically. I’m not talking about patient to

nurse ratios; I’m talking about male nurse to female nurse ratios. In other words, male nurses stand out like a clean displaced mid shaft femur fracture. On our ward currently, out of 51 staff members only 6 are men. That’s 1 male nurse for every 8.5 female nurses. Despite the era that we live in, there is still a strong stereotype that patients and even staff members have; that is that nurses are women and doctors are men. That is why some of the time patients assume that I am a doctor, (or a child with a beard).

“YOU’RE NOT A NURSE, YOU’RE A MAN”- Blood, tears, sweat, adrenaline, over 10,000 steps in 8 hours, a vast array of bodily fluids, bariatric patients, heavy lifting, physical and verbal abuse, big, gory, gaping wounds, paper work, paper work, paper work, medication management, multidisciplinary team coordinating etc. Nursing is not just about holding someone’s hand through a tough time or giving someone wet cloth for their fore-

head. It’s a very diverse job which requires a thick skin and a pliable heart along with an immense amount of skill and knowledge (and good old fashioned common sense). It takes a real man/woman to be a great nurse. I never understood why men are questioned about their motive to be a nurse; do female doctors ever get asked about their motive with the same judgement?

“WHY DON’T YOU BECOME A DOCTOR?”- This is often said with good intentions but in my head I cannot take it as anything but an insult to the nurse in me. This is often said by patients after they believe that you have done a wonderful job, or by relatives who think that nursing was a way to get into medicine. But this is what people fail to understand, if all the really good nurses were doctors then you would have a large amount of really incompetent nurses caring for you. Nursing and medicine are two completely different professions! Yes, doctors and nurses work as a team with other allied health professionals, but nursing is not the first step into medicine, nor do I work for a doctor, my boss is a nurse.

“CAN I PLEASE HAVE A FEMALE NURSE?”- Yes you may; in fact, you just made my shift a lot easier. Although I do respect everyone’s rights and wishes/ cultural needs, I often find myself in limbo. Do I try and change their mind about male nurses? Or do I just let it be and find one of my busy female colleagues? Part of me always wants to try and win the patient over and convince them that it won’t make a difference and that I may in fact to a better job but I often find myself bowing my head down and walking out of the room feeling utterly rejected and obstructed from doing my job. I have a message to the patients who request a female nurse: I am not here to do anything but my job, I am a trained

health care professional that wants nothing more than to help you perform your ADLs with no judgement or skewed intentions. If I were a doctor, would you mind the fact that I was a male? Is your OBGYN a female? Is your GP a Female? If you were on deaths door, would you prefer to wait for a team of female health professionals to save your life? If your answer was no to most of those, then why would you prefer a female nurse? Male nurses just want to do their job, nothing more, nothing less. All nurses look through the same glasses, male or female, we see you as a patient and nothing else. We all wear the same coloured scrubs; we all do the same thing.

“I’M NOT YOUR SISTER”- Believe it or not, nurses are no longer nuns nor have anything to do with the church anymore. Times have changed, stop dragging the profession back into the early 1900’s, you have a university degree; please address each other in a professional manner. Most of the time the word sister is thrown around casually and comically, which is fine, but when the kitchen staff look you straight in the beard and call you “SISTER” in front of patients and relatives, it takes a whole lot of strength to hold back from replying “does your other sister have chest hair too?”.

To end this article I would like to state: I’m not a “male nurse”, I’m A NURSE and proud of it. I just so happen to be a man.