2025 Nurses Week Collaboration
This collaboration is so special because I actually met Godfrey 8 years prior to working with him when he was my father’s nurse. Fast forward to today, Godfrey and I both work on a neurology unit right here in Gainesville, FL. It may not be said out loud, but there seems to be an underlying taboo about male nurses.
When most people think of a nurse, they associate that title with the person being a female. Working on a neurology unit, we deal with a lot of stroke patients that aren’t able to walk or sometimes even turn in bed without assistance. We also will deal with patients that have TBI’s or even brain tumors and can get aggressive. If I’m being honest, I wish we had more male nurses in the field to help with these types of situations.
Without further ado, sit back and enjoy this interview with Godfrey. I hope in reading this you’ll be able to understand that at the end of the day we are all human, a job is a job, and if you’re really passionate about the things in life, everyone around you will be able to see it and enjoy it too.
Tell us about yourself. Where are you from/currently working? How long have you been a nurse? What specialty are you working in today?
I’m Godfrey, I am 48 years old, born and raised in Miami. I have 3 sisters and I moved to Gainesville after my first year in college. I have been a nurse for 12 years and I went to Santa Fe class of 2013 for my nursing degree. I currently work in Neurology at UF Health-Shands in Gainesville, FL. I have been married to my best friend and most incredible partner in crime there ever was for 16+ years, and we have a 10 year old daughter and a 7 year old son.
What made you consider nursing?
I first had my heart set on becoming a veterinarian and worked at animal hospitals for experience in that field. As the prospect of vet school diminished, a friend of mine who is a nurse said that I should just become a nurse. I told her that I didn’t deal with people like that and that’s why I work with animals, and she said, “Well ya, but I work 3 days per week!”. I was like, “Wait! What?!” this might be a good idea after all. However, I still wasn’t completely sold on the idea, but it is what motivated me to at least look into the health science related field. If I had gone to vet school I would have $350,000 of debt before I worked a day in my career. Also, this all took place in the 2000’s, and I realized at the animal hospital that I worked at that being a veterinarian is not a recession proof job. I always wanted to have a family of my own and I started thinking about what is a career that I will always have a job no matter what? Nursing. What is a job that I can get no matter where I go? Nursing. I don’t need to be rich, I just want to provide for my family. I just want my family to be secured and their needs met. There are so many benefits that I have found in Nursing that I just never could foresee.
Being a man, how do you feel that has affected nursing?
Being a man in nursing certainly has its challenges. For starters, it’s not your typical gender role career and sometimes there are ignorant people that give you shit for it. Aside from the social expectations of what a nurse is, it is my first priority to gain my patient’s trust. That can be difficult when you are 3x the size of a fragile, old, perhaps confused, person. Other factors that can make things difficult is when a patient has had bad experiences with men, or has experienced domestic violence, sexual harassment, emotional/physical/verbal abuse. We don’t always know that these things are in their histories, so approaching them on an individual specific basis is hugely important.
I recently had a non-verbal patient whose husband was just a ranting lunatic sometimes, and with mostly good reason, but he would cuss out the doctors and claim to know more than they did and just on and on! I told him that I understood him, I see where he is coming from, that I too care for his wife and that I work for her, and to not let his behavior be an obstacle to his wife’s care. All of us can empathize, but I feel like my experiences and my angle and perspective of being a husband and a father could find a part of him that I could relate to. He was mad and frustrated that she is not doing well, and ultimately he is scared. That to me is the human quality that I bring to my career, and makes me a good nurse. I do that shit every damn day!
Where do you see yourself going in your nursing career?
I didn’t expect to be a med-surg neurology floor nurse. Ever. Still. My friends ask me all the time why I am still there. It does suck sometimes, but I genuinely love what I do. More importantly to me is that I love the people that I am doing it with. My type of co-workers, the quality and strangeness and oddities that they are, are not found everywhere. Somehow the universe crossed all of our paths and dumped us all into this crazy raging neurological dumpster fire together. What are the odds?! That is no coincidence! I don’t know where the path will wind next, but I really love orienting new nurses, and maybe nursing education could be down the road. Also, I think the field as a whole needs more mental health support in the hospitals for nurses to help realize when it’s time to stop and breathe for a minute.
How do you cope with the stress and pressure of working in your field?
The stress and pressure of nursing is real. It is so multiple-faceted and it comes from many directions and from many sources. Sometimes it is so abundant and overwhelming that you don’t even notice it until you’ve become a monster that hardly resembles who you actually are. Once I was so burned out and under so much work stress that I actually laughed at the mere suggestion of it being stress and pressure from work. The important things to consider is that you cannot do it all. You are one person. The demands that management, patients, and coworkers may put on you are not things that all have to be done at once.
Separating home life and work life is hard. I have always been one to keep home as a refuge from work, and work a refuge from home. I worry about home when I’m at home. I worry about work when I’m at work. My wife is an excellent sounding board for me because she is also a nurse and she knows how it goes, and she knows how I handle shit. She’s not afraid to tell me that maybe I could have done something a different way. It’s actually a luxury to have someone that close that understands all of the stresses and demands of being a nurse. It is very difficult to think intelligently and without mistake while someone is screaming at you while at the same time another one is trying to run down the hall naked with one leg…for 12 damn hours. Normal people (not nurses, or not healthcare people) do not understand no matter how much you tell them. Most therapists do not even understand what it’s like to be split into 15 segments and successfully complete the first hour of your shift. But my wife? My wife does and she is my refuge and my safe haven from everything under the sun.
What would you tell others considering nursing and going into your specialty?
I love neurology. Nobody has ever seen or discovered the full spectrum of neurological disorders. There are so many unrealized and mis-corellated diagnoses out there. Working at Shands I have seen so many things that the literature used to say, “Once you’ve seen one, you’ll never see another.” And I’ve seen them like 20 times. Neurology is a difficult service to work on. You will constantly be learning, and you will be ground down to a nub before it’s all over. It is very emotionally, mentally, and physically taxing. The healing and recovery is really rewarding to be a part of. The body is incredible in what it can tolerate and in what it can recover from.
How do you feel nursing has shaped you as a person?
Nursing, even with all of its stories and stresses, is a rewarding career for me. I didn’t ever want to be a nurse, I never knew I would be a nurse, and yet as the path has taken me where I belong I have always been a natural caregiver. It is who I am. I am an expert on human nature, and nothing surprises me anymore.
I recently went back to day shift after 10 years of night nursing. It wasn’t exactly by choice either. I almost lost it all because of stress and fatigue and just straight up being burned out. The night life (or night lack of life) started to get to me and it started to affect other parts of my life. One of the best things that has come out of it was becoming a diurnal mammal again. My sleep has regulated back to normal, my wife even says I’m less grumpy. The 4 days I’m off now, I get to be present with my family and involved, and functional, and actually feel happiness. I didn’t realize what had been lost until this one big event almost took it all away. In some ways the punishment was a little unreasonable and harsh, and in other ways I see the importance of what I do and how no matter how much I separate home from work, I can’t separate from being a nurse while I’m at home. It is the livelihood that provides for our way of life, and it is the perspective that we have of our world.
Pros and cons about nursing?
There are so many pros and cons to nursing. Pros: The schedule and the family availability is unmatched in any career. The salary and benefits are usually high end compared to those that pay outright for their benefits or have other plans. The variety of people you will meet and the friends you will make and the bonds that you will have are vast. Generally speaking, healthcare is a trustful field to work in. It is an upstanding career and only people that can thrive in it and handle it will do so successfully.
Cons: Stress. Lots of it. Fatigue, lots of that too. Physical overwhelm, yep that too. A full range of the emotional rollercoaster on a regular basis: Happy, sad, hopeful, encouraged, despised, hated, yelled at, screamed at, get shit thrown at you all in a big revolving circle. Sometimes you can’t pee when you have to, or can’t take a break when you need one, or eat. I am constantly astonished at how grown human adults behave.