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home / 世界杯决赛2022

tiktok's nurse john is the antidote to health care's stressful realities

"everything really deteriorated and it felt like i was alone" at the start of the pandemic, the montreal er nurse says: that's when it started.

by robin della corte

dec 20 2022
read time 4 minute read
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john dela cruz is an emergency department nurse in a montreal hospital. but on tiktok, he’s nurse john, with 3.2 million followers and more than 178 million likes on his videos, which parody patient-nurse scenarios.
“i think the first time someone ever asked to take a photo with me was last year,” dela cruz said.
“now i get recognized everywhere i go, so it’s getting more normal now, but in the beginning, i thought, ‘is this really my life now? am i really this person?'”
dela cruz, 27, immigrated to montreal from the philippines in 2012, after the death of his grandfather, who had lung cancer and alzheimer’s disease. dela cruz says his grandfather’s death is what inspired him to pursue nursing.
“i saw my whole family struggling to take care of him because we didn’t have a nurse at home showing us how to feed him or what to do if he’s having trouble breathing or swallowing,” dela cruz said.
“it was traumatizing seeing this and i felt this regret that i couldn’t do more. when i arrived here, i told myself, ‘i want to do something in my life where i can take care of someone like i’m taking care of my grandpa’.”

dela cruz began the nursing program at dawson college in 2018. the covid-19 pandemic hit as he finished his degree and he was immediately hired after his last stage in a medical surgical unit at the hospital where he now works.

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“i felt like i was getting thrown into all this,” dela cruz said. “already working as a new nurse is a lot of stress, but with a new virus, there’s this added stress with new regulations, ways of preventing co-infection — and it changes every single day.”

dela cruz says his usual 12-hour shifts would sometimes extend to 16 hours, seven days a week, and vacations were pushed back because of staffing shortages.

“i sometimes thought, ‘is this job really for me? am i really made to be a nurse?’ ” dela cruz said. “you love your job so much but then you start hating it because of the conditions you are put in. it is not what i imagined being a nurse was. everything really deteriorated and it felt like i was alone. that’s when the whole social media thing started.”
dela cruz posted his first tiktok video in may 2020 as “a way to escape reality.”
“at first, i didn’t even want to post my face. i was just watching videos. but as tiktok got more popular, it started changing and other creators were starting to talk to the camera, showing a bit more of their personality and it wasn’t just a dancing app any more.”
in his first video, he responded to another user who had asked users to talk about undervalued and underpaid professions. dela cruz made a video response wearing scrubs and tapping his registered nurse badge without saying anything. it garnered 2 million views, 350,000 likes and thousands of comments and shares.
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that fall, dela cruz began the two-year nursing program at mcgill university while working at the hospital. he uploaded a few more videos that also went viral.
“nurses around the world were commenting on my videos and saying how funny and relatable my videos were,” dela cruz said. “i found a community of people who were going through the same thing as me and that’s when i decided to keep making videos.”
with videos inspired by everyday encounters with a comedic spin, dela cruz went from 800,000 followers at the end of 2020 to 3.2 million followers by the beginning of this year. his most popular videos have almost 35 million views.
he has also started earning through tiktok, with brand collaborations that include garde-malade, a quebec company that designs trendy clothing for health-care professionals.
“i saw that i could get people’s attention through my humour and bring awareness to what nurses go through every single day,” he said. “people watch my videos because it’s not boring or me just saying, ‘being a nurse is such a hard job’.”
dela cruz hadn’t attended his cegep graduation because of the pandemic, but was at his mcgill convocation.
“i was so excited to finally wear the full gown and cap, it felt so satisfying to celebrate how far i’ve come,” dela cruz said. “but when i went on stage, everyone was chanting ‘nurse john!’ and taking pictures and people were saying, ‘wait, he’s in our school?’ it was funny, but the faculty was just looking at me wondering, ‘who is this man?’ ”

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dela cruz says he will never leave nursing despite his social media popularity.
“this is what i always wanted to do. it all started with wanting to be a nurse, but now with my videos, i’m impacting others from the other side of the world and not just in my hospital,” he said.
“my grandpa forgot everything before he died, but he woke up on my birthday and said happy birthday, and two days later he passed away. i always tell myself i think he’s proud of me. i want him to know that i’m making an impact on people’s lives and i’m giving people what i regret not being able to give to him.”

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