One is the director of an adult camp for cancer patients. Another started a clinic for the working poor and homeless. Yet another teaches other nurses how to navigate the increasingly complex technology in health care.

What all these nurses have in common is that they are nurses of excellence who have been honored by their peers.

For the past few years I have had the opportunity - and honor - to meet the nurses who have been nominated for excellence at the Georgia Nurses Association's Nurse of the Year awards banquet.

I continually marvel at how these nurses juggle job responsibilities, professional growth, community activism and family commitments - and still stay on top of their game.

Mary Gullatte of Emory Hospitals took home the top honor as Georgia's 2004 Nurse of the Year, yet all were honored for the jobs they do. There are many nurses who might never be honored in this way, and therefore aren't recognized as heroes in their everyday jobs. Whether holding a patient's hand, comforting a child who is getting a spinal tap or even reentering a stack of patient charts into a computer because it crashed, these nurses exemplify a profession that is profoundly important.

BARRY WILLIAMS / Special

The Georgia Nurses Association celebrated the excellence of nurses from across the state at its annual banquet last month.

It takes guts and a sense of humor to be a nurse today.

There's less help and more work. There's an increasingly burdensome health care system loaded with endless red tape and bureaucracy that often seems to contradict the Hippocratic oath, "First, do no harm." There's little thanks and loads of personal responsibility. And did I mention that there are more patients who are acutely ill than ever before?

But there is hope amid the chaos, and for those who choose it, nursing still provides one of the best opportunities to make a difference in someone's health and well-being, or even in how a patient deals with death.

Gullatte bases her life and practice on Etienne de Grellet's familiar words: "I shall pass through this world but once. If, therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, let me do it now ... for I shall not pass this way again."

I know there will always be unsung nurses who will never be recognized for all that they do. Their everyday acts of courage and kindness are noted. And I honor them every day.

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