My mother was a registered nurse for nearly 50 years.

But if Irene Whale were starting out today, coming from an apple-growing family of modest means in the small, northeast Washington town of Oroville, it’s unlikely she’d be able to cover the costly training. And the profession would have to do without one of the best.

For most of her working years, my mother worked for minimum wage. Only near the close of her career did nurses begin to earn more. She fought for that, and I’m proud of her.

There are many nurses-to-be like my mother in training now, the great majority — but not all of them — young women.

Given the nation’s aging population, workforce turnover, educational barriers, and the many nurses older than 5o years of age and reaching retirement age, this dire situation will continue to be dire, and without a miracle, dire into a full-blown crisis, affecting hospitals, long-term care facilities, outpatient clinics, schools, community health organizations and patient care.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects there will be 193,000 openings for RN’s each year through 2032. And public health outcomes, patients, healthcare delivery and nursing at large will continue to suffer. Anyone who has been a patient in a hospital knows that he or she spent more time with the nurses than with doctors. Not even close.

When I was in the intensive care unit of a local hospital for two months in 2021 following cancer surgery and its near fatal aftermath for me, it was the nurses who appeared at all hours of the day and night to stick me with needles, check my blood, monitor me, talk to me. Those pains in the neck kept me alive and I am grateful for them.

Only rarely did I see doctors. It is no exaggeration to say that the nursing profession is what keeps hospitals, untold clinics, and community health organizations running.

Okay, scratch that bit about “profession.”

Because two weeks ago, the Trump Administration stepped out of the shadows and poured gas onto the fire. Nursing, it declared, soon will no longer qualify as a profession.

One of the immediate effects will be that young nurses in training, again, most of them women, will no longer qualify for the higher government loans they need to complete their education.

So … we’ll have … fewer nurses …when we need … more? Have I got that right? Does that even make a nano-lick of sense? It does not.

All we can do is throw our hands up in the air, and ask, “why?” I’ve heard a number of women surmise that it would further the administration’s goal of reducing the number of women in the workforce.

Is that what it is? Is it to save money, when the government is profligate in all other regards? The loans nurses-in-training take out, which they will pay back, help them pick up the knowledge they’ll need to save our butts.

That money is our collective investment in life. Our lives, your life, the lives of your loved ones.

And from 2021 to today, my life.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.