John Dela Cruz, comedian, content creator, and former nurse, explains why he burned out and what nurses need now.
What inspired you to become a nurse?
What really inspired me to become a nurse is my mom. She was a caregiver for almost 29 years of her life. She has taken care of toddlers, teenagers, adults, and elderly people. Caregiving is basically nursing, and seeing her work that hard, seeing her get people better, seeing how appreciative they were, gave me a sense of “I want to do what she’s doing.” You are making a difference in people’s lives, including strangers.
The second reason is my grandparents. My mom was a single mother, so she had to leave for work, and my grandparents basically raised me. My grandfather is my dad figure, and he developed lung cancer and Alzheimer’s.
It was so hard seeing him deteriorate and forget who he was, and it was so hard not to be able to do anything for him. The combination of my mom and my grandfather’s situation led me to think, “I want to do something in my life where I can take care of other people and make them feel better.” There is no other profession that does that the way nursing does. That is what brought me to this career.
What moment shaped the nurse you are today?
COVID-19 shaped me because I graduated at the very beginning of it — literally day one.
Nursing school is one of the hardest programs you can go into. It is so competitive that it almost feels like the Hunger Games. Whoever lasts is who becomes a nurse.
Graduating without a professor watching you, being responsible for other people’s lives, plus COVID-19, was frightening. The pandemic was ever-changing every single day. There were new rules, new ways of washing hands, new ways of putting masks on. All of that together was traumatizing, and it shaped the nurse I am today.
It got to a point where it was not shocking when someone died right in front of me. It became so normal that I was numb to the emotions of death. Death should be, “Oh my God, somebody just died.” That is traumatizing. But it got to the point where it was just another body to bag up and send to the morgue.
It lingered because the compassion and empathy I have for nursing, and who I really am as a caring person, were emotions I kept inside. In nursing, it almost feels like you cannot be emotional. You have to be professional. You cannot cry. But the John inside of me was saying, “You can cry. You can be mad. You can be emotional.” That battle inside me, mostly around my mental health, is what contributed to my burnout in the profession.
What helps you feel valued and supported as a nurse?
What helped me feel valued was realizing that my only support is me, and that you cannot rely on big hospitals to give you the help you need. You can scream “help,” and they might hear it three months later, once you have already helped yourself.
The priority is not you. It is the patients and their satisfaction. There are more people coming in, and we are replaceable. If you quit today, they do not care, because they can replace you tomorrow.
What really helped, and this was hard for me to realize at the time, was that I needed to go to therapy and have a psychiatrist evaluate me. That therapist helped me see how important it is to set boundaries, because nurses are naturally givers. We give, and we take less than what we give. We give so much that we forget we also deserve the same care we give to strangers.
That giving quality gets taken advantage of, until at some point you think, “Wait a second, I am giving way too much. It is time to set boundaries and realize that nursing is not the whole of me. I am John before I am Nurse John. I am Emily before I am Nurse Emily.” I can separate those and realize I don’t have to be abused by a system that takes advantage of my good qualities as a human being and as a nurse.
Here’s what else happens: You give so much to strangers that when you get home, when you can finally be exactly who you are, you have nothing left for the people who love you and know you. It’s almost a joke in the profession. You don’t want to speak to anyone when you get home. “I don’t want to call my friend. I don’t want to speak to my wife or my husband. Just leave me alone.” We are still struggling with that. We give so much to strangers, but we forget that the people who love us, our family and our friends, are more important. They deserve the same love we give to strangers.
The difficult part is that we are so drained from work that we do not have it left when we go back to our personal lives.
What innovations excite you most about the future of nursing?
I think we are heading toward the good. Nurses are becoming more resourceful and learning how to use the resources available to them. Social media fueled that. It came to nursing slowly, but it let nurses see people in different states and different countries and realize our suffering was universal.
“Oh my God, this nurse from Australia said you can actually take personal days for yourself instead of just sucking it up for the system and for your job.”
There are a lot of developments right now around nurses’ mental health. They are building things like hotlines we can call if we’re depressed or anxious.
There are more innovations out there. It’s just hard to see exactly what is being offered, because the truth is that nurses everywhere are so tired and burnt out. The positives are buried because the negatives in the profession outweigh them. We are on strike almost every month. California just finished one. Now Massachusetts is doing it. British Columbia just started. The innovation and the future of nursing feel almost on hold until the problems in our profession get resolved.
That is what a lot of nurses want anyway. “Okay, these things are good for us, an easier way of charting with AI, an easier way of dispensing medication. Those are fun and innovative and good, but let’s address the core problem: the understaffing, our pay, our safety.”
That is what needs to be addressed if we want the future of nursing to be easier for the new generation and healthier for the ones who want to be like us.
How can nurses use their voices and experiences to inspire change?
They can inspire change by speaking up. Nurses have stayed silent for years and decades because it feels like we don’t have the power. The CEOs of hospitals are way too powerful. They are going to shut us down. They are going to threaten us. They are going to do everything to keep our mouths shut.
But nurses are speaking up now. They are building unions, unions that protect nurses instead of depending on hospitals, because hospitals are not defending us. We have to build unions that are run by nurses.
There are a lot of strikes going on in the healthcare community right now, and states that are not unionized are planning to unionize, because they are seeing it. Massachusetts recently held the biggest nursing strike in the state’s history. There were 4,500 nurses out of their hospitals asking for higher pay. “Groceries, housing, gas, everything is going up, but our pay stayed exactly the same. CEOs are earning $8.4 million a year, and we are doing the hard job for the people. Support us.”
The problem is that if we get scared of the power of the higher-ups, we will never change the game for the rest of us or for the future of nursing. Speak up, build unions, and stand your ground. It’s time for us to be heard, because we have been listening to everyone else and putting everything we have into these hospitals so they can run.
How has continued learning helped you grow as a nurse?
Nursing is an ever-learning environment. You keep learning every single day, because it’s not like you finish college, get your diploma, and that is all the studying you will ever do.
There is so much you can do in nursing. If you are an emergency nurse, you can train to be a cardiovascular nurse or a nurse practitioner. You could learn to be a wound care nurse. It’s a continuous learning experience.
For me, I went from being a bedside nurse to teaching. I had to take courses to become an instructor, and doing that increased my knowledge, because now I am handling students, the future of nursing. I teach them not just the right way, but the reality of nursing through my experience, so they can be more informed than I was.
That is what I tell them: “Here is the textbook way, and here is the reality. As someone who has lived the reality, I am not going to sugarcoat what the textbook tells you. I will tell you the truth about the profession that the books do not.”
