I was fourteen years old when I decided I wanted to be a
nurse. I walked down Yanceyville St in Greensboro, NC to the local American Red
Cross station. I got my CPR and first aid. I was very proud of myself. No one
had asked me to do it. I really wasn’t sure what prompted the desire. I was
fourteen, it could have been anything. After that, I went to Moses Cone and
became a candy striper. Back in the day when they were called a candy striper
and not a junior volunteer. We had the cute little pink and white candy striped
dress. I loved it. I got to do medical records and go to MRI, take films back
and forth. I thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere of the hospital. Later that
summer, I had to move to Va to live with my father and I put in the back of my
head the desire to be a nurse. I was a teenager. I was rebellious. I really
didn’t want to do anything that anyone wanted me to do and I ended up getting
married at seventeen and moving to Mayport Fl when I had my newborn at
eighteen. My ex husband was in the Navy and he was out in Puerto Rico or just
deployed most of the time. I was eighteen years old, in Florida, with a
newborn. I loved an adventure so I handled it very well. I loved it. I loved
being on my own. That lasted about a year or so and we moved back to Va. I
started working at a nursing home in Fredericksburg Va that would train you and
certify you to be a nursing assistant. I was in the process of doing that when
my then husband I split up and about six months later my son and I moved back
to Greensboro NC where I had originally moved from and I quickly sought out a
school that would teach me to be a CNA and help me get certified. Then I
started working at Forsyth in Winston-Salem. I loved it. I absolutely loved it.
I was working on a medical-surgical floor. I was working night shifts and I did
that for a while. Then I got in to working at a medical insurance company
called Aetna. No experience with anything but some of my best experiences have
been those that I’ve gone into blinded and just seeking out a new opportunity.
So I worked at Aetna. I quickly rose in the company. I was there about five
years. I left there to go to United Healthcare. Again, nursing school was still
in the back of my head but it was just being put off. We obtained custody of my
second husband’s niece and nephew; his brother’s children in 2000. I had gone
to school on and off, trying to get the credits I needed to get into nursing
school. At some point, we decided to move from Greensboro NC to Stedman NC,
which is outside of Fayetteville. It was, I believe, 2002. I was pursuing prerequisites
to get into the nursing program. I was still a cna but I wasn’t really doing
it. I managed to secure a job working for a pediatric neurology office. I
started out front desk but quickly rose to being the office manager. I brought
all his billing in house. He was having it sent out for third party billers to
do. He had a billing company doing it and I brought it all in house. I worked
with him for seven years. During that time, I gave birth to my second son. My
children are fourteen years apart. My niece and nephew that we had custody of
went to live in Louisiana with their father and things just kept getting put
off. I was working on that career. I was performing EEGs in the office because
my philosophy of style is that you need to know every job that is under your
command. That way if someone is out that you can cover for them and if you need
to train someone you can do that as well. It’s just very important to know all
aspects of your job.
I got into nursing school in August 2009 and I started at
Sampson Community College. In January of 2010, my husband and I split up. My
second husband. I stayed in nursing school until June or July of 2010 when I
was getting ready to start my senior year. They had summer school there. We
were doing our psych rotation when I withdrew. Basically lawyer fees, health
problems, just all kinds of issues were going on at one time. I did not doubt
that I would graduate nursing school but I do not feel like I would be a very competent
nurse. So I withdrew. Went and started doing billing for a very busy
psychiatric practice in Fayetteville. And I got my act together. Got my home
situated. Got my son where he needed to be. And then I reapplied to nursing
school at Johnston Community College in Smithfield. I didn’t want to go back to
Sampson. I felt it held some memories that I just did not want to deal with at
that time. So I got into Johnston and I finished this past May. I graduated. I
still want to cry when I think about all things that have happened over the
last 24-25 years that have been my journey to getting what I wanted to do. That
I continually let life get in the way. That happens. Life does get in the way
sometimes and if you allow it too, it will continually do so. That’s just how
it works. Now, whenever I see youth, I tell them, you always have time to get
married and have a family. Do what you want. Serve in the military. Go to
college. Travel to Europe. Do mission work. Just do the things that you have
the desire to do because you do not want to turn around later and have regrets
that you didn’t get it done.
My goal in nursing has always been to serve
others. I’ve always been a selfless person, per say. I have always felt the
need to make others comfortable. I am very empathetic. I can very easily place
myself in other peoples’ shoes and understand their point of view. I work at Johnston Medical Center in
Smithfield. I absolutely love it. I’m a very firm believer
that God puts us where we need to be and not necessarily where we want to be. I
have found on a medical-surgical floor that I may have five and six patients a
day but I still have time to connect with people. I still am able to have that
conversation with that elderly person that’s telling me “you don’t understand
what it’s like to lose your dignity, for your body to fail but your mind to
still be sharp”. I had another one tell me “there is no such thing as modesty
when you reach our age”. My favorite population is the elderly and I want to
care for elderly patients. I want their quality of life to be the best that it
can be until the very end. They deserve it. They have stories to tell. I love
to write. I love collecting stories. I love knowing where someone came from,
what they did when they were young. Did they grow up in tobacco fields, cotton
fields? Did they marry young? What did they do for a living? Where did they go
to school? Did they have any children? I love to talk to the spouse of one of
my patients and find out what he was really like when he was younger. I ask to
see pictures. I talk to these people. I’m very much a person that wants to be
able to not just treat a patient, their wounds or give them medicine or do
those types of things. I’m the type that wants to be able to make sure they
have the resources available when they leave the hospital that they need. I’ve
been looking at career paths and I was looking at being a nurse practitioner
and I was looking at being a clinical nurse specialist. Based on my research it
looks like the clinical nurse specialist is where I want to be. It is a
well-rounded career that includes all aspects of patient care, to include case
management, to include treatment of their disease process. I want to be able to
follow up with a patient after they’ve left my facility, to make sure they
don’t just come back. I will have a patient for three days. Just recently I had
a patient that I had her as a patient. I discharged her. I saw that she had
come back in and then the last week I worked, she had passed away. She was not
old. She’d been very ill but she had told me when I was
discharging her that she was ready to go home. She said that when you feel
good, you want to be at home. She said “I feel good right now, that’s where I want
to be. When I feel bad again, I’ll come back to the hospital”. She knew. She
was happy. She knew what the result was going to be. I felt sad when I heard
she had passed but I felt good as well because I felt like she truly knew and
lived her life as best she could in the condition she was in. And that’s all we
can ever ask of anyone is that they have that opportunity to live life. I wrote
a story a couple of years ago for a class I was taking at Sampson Community
College. The story tells of what it was like for me in my head during my
struggles and I’m going to read it right now.
I never finished the story because I never knew where it was
going to end. My story is actually just beginning. I’ve graduated. I have my
whole future career as a nurse in front of me. And I have so many things that
interest me. I’m 41 so I don’t really have the luxury of just taking time off
and enjoying my new job because I feel that if I want to pursue my education as
far as it will go, then I need to start working on it now.
Nursing is a career. It is not a job. It’s a calling. It’s a
gift. It is something that unless you are a nurse, you don’t understand. That
you put your heart out there for other people to lean on you. You put yourself
out there to be abused verbally, to be attacked physically, and yet you treat
the pauper as well as the king. You treat the criminal as well as the elderly
patient. You treat everyone with dignity and respect because that’s the least
you can do. Anybody can dress wounds. Anybody can administer medications. All
these things can be taught. It’s the art of compassion, the art of follow
through, the art of making sure that you are doing the best for every patient
you have no matter what kind of day you have, no matter what kind of home life
you have that you are present in that moment with that patient. There are many
many days when nurses go home and they want to cry, or they cry before they
leave work in the break room. Because it is emotionally draining. It’s
physically draining. But it is rewarding. If you can get up in the morning and
you can pray on your way to work that someone touches your life, not just that
you touch someone else’s life but that someone touches your life. That you get
something out of your day. You can’t have a bad day. There’s not one day I’ve
ever gone to work as a cna, as a nurse, as an office manager, as a biller; any
job that I have had, I have always taken something away from the day. I’ve
always had a good day and it’s always been because I was able to help someone and I was able to
learn something from that individual
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