To hear that is every nurses’s nightmare. You spend years working hard to the best you can. Often missing lunch, skipping breaks, holding your bladder to care for your patients. Year after year, those sacrifices become routine. Then one day, they are reduced to a single sentence.

“You did not meet the quota.”

Should care be measured?

In numbers?

In how quickly you move from one patient to the next ?

In how you efficiently end a conversation?

Isn’t it all one-sided?

You know you did a good job but at the back of your mind, a tiny doubt begins to linger.

You begin to question your efforts.

Your skill.

Your worth.

How inhuman to think of it that way.

We are in the caring business but who cares for us-the caregivers?

We are just part of the equation.

Productivity has no heart.

Perhaps, that is the tragedy.

Care remembers people.

Productivity remembers numbers.

A verbal warning.

Loud enough to topple your world.

The sum of it all- your hard work and sacrifice.

You are only as good as it comes.

Tomorrow holds no promises.

Will this count too?

Drowning.

We’ve all been drowning each time we come to work. It doesn’t matter how you swim, fast or slow, or barely floating.

It is still drowning.

We normalized it by thinking if we could survive one heavy shift, we could survive a heavier one. And yes, you told yourself “You can do it !”, over and over again, until you believe it. At the end of each shift, you walk out defeated.

That is the truth nobody wants to hear.

Now here comes the new nurses and the student nurses. You want to set a good example to them. That taking care of a human being is the noblest job in the world. Here, you teach them how to log in the computer, look at a patient’s file, their labs, their meds, their doctors. In the end, they ended up not looking at the patient from all the commotions. Missing the most important point. Where is the caring? And how we teach them is , if you did not chart it, it didn’t happen.

The consequences.

Somebody speaks out. This is too heavy. It is not safe. We’re short-staffed. Can you make it better? That big question directed to management. Written out in the employee surveys. Discussed on the town hall meetings. The higher ups listened.

Their answer is looking back at you with these words, “How can you make it better?”

Consequences.

Twenty-five years of nursing and I still don’t have the answer to that.

Caring has become my greatest burden.

I wish I had more time to take care of my patients.

I wish.

I woke up today feeling a little strange. I had long given up my night shifts and switched to days. A regular eight-to-four job. Five days a week. No weekends, no holidays perks- that took a load of burden off my shoulders. Or so i thought. There are others things I realize that were missing in my life. Days that provide no light for me, even if literally can see it everyday now, they do not offer what I craved for. I lived in Texas where the sun can shine its brightest. It can engulf you in its scorching, burning heat. So, still, I chose to lived indoors, in the cool shade of my home.

I work days now. I go to sleep like the rest of the world at nights. I am finally living like a normal person. I should feel alive, right?

I’m not.

I remembered vividly coming out of nightshift , walking out in the parking lot and out in the open blue sky was a rainbow so beautiful, so magnificent in its color. I felt like I witnessed a miracle right before my very eyes. My job carries heavy weight of caring for fragile lives, I’ve almost forgotten these little joys that’s still out there. A nice gentle breeze, a fresh breath of sunshine, a faint scent of flowers nearby, and the humming of the birds hidden, somewhere among the trees. These are things that remind me of the old days, my childhood, my youth, my care-free days. These were all from my past.

When did I stop looking outside? I was so busy just trying to survive the night, making sure my patients were alive just to come back next day, re-living the same set-up, over and over again. So many years it took from me. Living in that never ending cycle of life and death. I seriously felt there was no way out. It the same thing everywhere, everyday. Yup, no way out. So, I stayed in that hole. A hole I thought would be the end of me. I did not look anywhere else. Somehow, I remembered Miss Copolla’s smile, and I wanted to see that smile so badly. I’m a pretty simple-minded person. I decided to give up nights and work on days now. I thought I’ll see Miss Copolla again.

Not yet.

I walked outside today and saw the world. The world as it is. I walked my dog over a little piece of pond, covered with well-trimmed grass around it, with trimmed flowers and trees planted around the area. Picture-perfect. Yes, it is beautiful thing to see. I smelled the freshly scent of mowed grass. I also see how hard it is to keep this place like this. The hands that planted the plants, kept the place clean and heavenly. If only people were made that way, we would all be living happily right now.

I am still looking for a way out. Until then, I will keep looking for Miss Copolla.

Not because I hadn’t been working. I had started three IVs, turned a patient who couldn’t turn himself, held a daughter’s hand while her father’s numbers dropped. I had done the work of nursing. What I hadn’t done was prove it- not yet, not in the system that decides whether the hospital gets paid, whether the unit passes the audit, whether I did my job.

Nurses spend up to forty percent of s shift on documentations. I didn’t need a study to tell me that. I have felt it in my shoulders, in the hour I stayed after clock-out, in the meals I didn’t eat because there was one more note to finish before the next one started.

For twenty-five years, I worked in waters that were never smooth. Choppy with billing codes. Undertow with liability. Every field I filled in fed a database built up to protect the hospital, not to help the nurse standing at the bedside. Care and paperwork became two separate jobs wearing the same scrubs, and only one of them could be measured, so only one of them counted.

I told you last week about Miss Copolla. About caring that asked nothing for more than the basic, honest work of it. I have spent a career trying to find my way back to that caring, rowing against a current built for someone else’s bottom line.

So when people ask me what I think about AI coming for healthcare, I don’t think about robots. I think about time. I think about whether, for once, a system might be built for us- the ones who do the caring- instead of only for the ones who count the cost of it.

Here is the plain truth about the old system. It was never designed for with the nurse in mind. The electronic chart exists to protect the hospital from lawsuits and to justify what gets billed. Every click, every dropdown, every mandatory field is a small tax collected from the only person in the building who is actually touching the patient.

I have paid that tax for twenty-five years. In missed breaks. In charting after my child was asleep. In the particular exhaustion of doing a full day’s caring and then doing a second, invisible shift just to prove that I did.

So I went looking. Is there such a system built for us instead of against us?

There might be, and it surprised me to find real evidence of it.

At Cedars-Sinai, an AI assistant called Aiva was handed to nurses who had decades on the floor- some with over forty years experience, pretty skeptical about anything with the word “smart” attached to it. The ones who doubted it hardest are now the ones who say it gave them back in real time, time they hadn’t expected to get back at this stage of a career built on doing without.

At UCLA Health, something even more telling is happening. Nurses aren’t just handed the tool and told to adapt. They sit in the room while it’s built. They test it, break it, tell the engineers what’s wrong with it, and the tool changes because a nurse said so. That is the whole argument, right there. Technology built with the people who do the caring, not for them by people who have never stood at the bedside at three in the morning.

That distinction is everything. Miss Copolla’s caring never needed anyone’s permission or design. Ours does now- but for the first time in a long while, some of that design is finally including the nurse in the room.

i want to be honest with you though, because smooth water can still hide rocks underneath.

Most hospitals still have no real policy for how these tools should be used. The technology is moving faster than the guardrails around it. And i understand the fear some of my fellow nurses carry- that leaning too hard on a machine could dull an instinct that took years on the floor to earn.I know what that instinct feels like. It is not something I would trade for convenience, and I don’t think any nurse worth her scrubs would either.

So this isn’t a piece about AI saving nursing. It’s a piece about whether we, the nurses, get a hand on the wheel this time- instead of being told, once again to keep rowing.

I think about the twelve-hour shift again. The one where I hadn’t touched the chart by hour eight.

I imagine it differently now. The vitals already logged before I’ve left the room, because the machine caught what I had said out loud while my hands were still on the patient. The note half-written before I sit down, because it listened to the parts that mattered and skipped the parts that didn’t. Not a nurse replaced. A nurse cleared of the noise, so I can do the one thing no machine can- sit at the bedside a little longer, hold the hand that needs holding, notice the ting that isn’t in any dropdown menu.

Maybe that is what smooth water actually means. Not that the work gets easier. Just that, for once, I am not the one bailing it out alone.

In a couple of minutes, Miss Copolla used to say, and somehow it was always enough. Maybe that’s all I’m asking of this new tide. A couple of minutes given back to me, so I can spend them the way she taught me-on the person in front of me, and nothing else.

Four feet eight inches. That was all of her.

But her voice could call an army in no time, no weight behind it needed. She didn’t have to raise it. It just carried- the way small women do sometimes, like the size of a person has nothing to do with the size of a room they can fill.

I called her Miss Copolla. Short for “a couple of minutes.”

That was her answer to everything.

How long till you’re done?

“In a couple of minutes.”

How long till you get here?

“In a couple of minutes.”

Hurry up!

“In a couple of minutes!”

Hang on a second!

“Give me a couple of minutes!”

She started and ended her stories with a couple of minutes. It was her favorite expression for all kinds of errands, all kinds of days. It meant wait. It meant I’m coming. It meant don’t rush me, I’ve got this. And once, when I needed it most, it meant something closer to a blessing.

Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.

“In a couple of minutes.”

I met her in my early nanny days here in America. I was a nanny first, before I became a nurse- reviewing for my state boards, single, and not knowing a single soul in this country. My introduction to American life started very humbly. Three little ones and a tiny woman with a big voice were the first people who made a stranger’s country feel like it might, eventually, be mine.

She had three kids of her own, all of whom adored her. Caring, for her, was a given- no pressure beyond the basic job of it. Take care of the little ones. Do it honestly. Get paid fairly at the end of the day. That was the whole arrangement. Nothing more was of her, and she had never asked for more than that in return.

She is retired now. But she never really left. She has become an extension of the family she cared for. The kids are grown, with families of their own, and they still call her, still visit her on special occasions, still count her as theirs. That is what real caring does. It doesn’t end when the job does.

She made my stay in America bearable in those first few years. I did not have any family here yet. I had her.

Through her eyes, I saw caring in its most basic form. Just being a nice human being. Taking care of the basic. Most of us have forgotten how a simple upbringing - humor, hard work, integrity - can mold a child to deal with life’s imperfections. We have made caring complicated. She never did.

Caring is powerful that way. it builds you into something great. And its absence -slow, quiet, unannounced - feeds you seeds of mistrust instead, until it becomes an unhealthy mindset that, left long enough, self-destructs.

I did not know it then, in those early years, humble and unmoored. But Miss Copolla was giving me something i would spend the rest of my career trying to give back - to patients, to family, to strangers on their worst days.

She just needed a couple of minutes.

Turns out, that was enough to last a lifetime.

I think about her now, on the floor, in a job she never had to do.

Because nursing today is not measured in a couple of minutes anymore. It is measured in minutes, period. Counted, time-stamped, entered into a field. How long to start an IV. How long to draw the labs, admit the patient, discharge the patient. How long did it take to give the meds. Twelve hours, sliced into intervals, and every intervals belongs to the paper, not the person.

Caring itself, gets the yellow flag. Not because it didn’t happen- because it can’t be proven the way the rest can. We say we care for you by doing this. By clicking the box, by charting the vitals, by finishing the note before the next one starts. Care gets pushed back to make room for more to document. The actual sitting with someone, the actual caring - that has no field of its own. There is nowhere to enter it.

And if the sick gets better, count it lucky. She did her job. As if getting better were the paperwork’s doing, and not the years of instinct nobody put in a box.

I keep asking myself what nursing will look like in the years ahead, if this keeps being the shape of it. Whether there is a future where a nurse can still be Miss Copolla to somebody- no pressure beyond the basic, honest work of taking care of another person- instead of a nurse being asked to prove, that the caring even happened at all.

Lately, I have started to wonder if the answer might be a strange one. Not a person this time, but a machine - the same technology that has, in many ways, made things harder for us on the floor. I did not expect to look for hope there. But i have started to see glimpses of it. Nurses, decades into their careers, being handed tools built with them instead of for them, told that hand back the very thing Miss Copolla gave freely - time, and the room to actually care.

I do not know yet if the water gets any smoother.

But if you’ll give me a couple of minutes each Saturday, I’d like to find out with you.

Sometimes, it takes longer than a day, a week, a month. Battles fought from within, body and soul. Plenty of times, you ask yourself why. The words come, but the body refuses. Pride always comes first. Exhaustion? Maybe. Frustration? So be it. At the end of the day, you come up empty. That’s the worst feeling you can have. So, you pick up your pen. Write your way until you feel better.

Dead ends.

That’s how i deal with it.

What’s your take?

How do you deal with dead ends?

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