How has the pandemic changed my view of nursing ?

During the pandemic, I worked as a critical care nurse in an intensive care unit that was overturned by almost doubling our patient capacity due to the overwhelming amount of critically ill patients in our unit and those we accepted from outside our hospital.  This definitely changed my view on nursing, and surprisingly in a positive way.  The article by Anderson et al., (2022) described intensive care units as war zones with the most challenging ethical times known in nursing.  Within the first few months of the pandemic, I might have agreed with this statement but overtime I realized that even in this so-called war zone, the teamwork and the empathy we all had for one another and for humanity surmounted any negative thoughts of war.   My view for my colleagues and how I appreciated them changed.  The reason why we all became nurses shined through my colleague’s actions, more so than I ever noticed before.  Eckerbald et al., (2025) suggested that the standard of care changed during the pandemic in how we cared for patients and became less holistic.  I will admit that caring for some patients became more less personalized than prior to the pandemic, because almost all the patients had the same diagnosis with the same outcomes. However, the resilience and the adaptation I saw nurses demonstrate reminded me of why I chose nursing in the first place.  The theme of collaboration emerged in our work to show patients and their family’s dignity and compassion in such trying times.