Nursing as a career

I am a high school senior and I have volunteered at the local transplant hospital for three years until I was hired as a non certified nurse assistant. I started helping sick children and loved it. I really got interested in NICU nursing. I thought was nursing the perfect career fit for me, but everything shattered.

A nurse I worked with for four years about seven years older than me quit. The hospital was understaffing the floor I worked on to the point she feared her license would be revoked. My father, a nephrologist who works on the same floor, broke the news to me. He said it's horrible and that the hospitals are run by businessmen who only care about making money, so they don't hire enough nurses to save money.

I'm scared. I have always had a plan and I thought found my passion and now I don't know if I want to be a nurse anymore. I don't even know what I can do because helping others who are sick and in need is my passion.

Can anyone offer any advice? Are nurses unhappy at their jobs? Do you regret becoming a nurse?
Depends on the institution. But yes, the prevailing theme within nursing seems to be a higher and higher nurse-patient ratio.

The fear of losing one's nursing licensure is grossly blown out of proportion by many nurses. The truth is that licensure revocation does not occur easily.Most nurses lose their licensing over theft, diversion, impaired practice, and other issues surrounding addiction.

Yes, nurses are working shorter and taking on more patients with a higher acuity. However, that is not a primary reason nurses lose their licenses. If you go to the BON website for your state, you may be able to find a listing of license disciplinary actions. What you may see will probably surprise you- the last update I looked at for my state had several pages of disciplinary actions, and all but 2 people had reasons of drugs, alcohol, or criminal activity.