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| Holy Thrombosis, Batman! It's Pinning Day! |
While going over the enormity of the last two years, I thought about the life you have, versus the life you choose.
See, the life you have is your natural trajectory. You’re born, you take a job, you work the job, you die. And while it’s not always safe, it’s always settling. You’re not growing. You’re not carving your own path. You're just going through the expected motions.
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| And you find yourself in a practice room with a toddler who is not. having. it. 2013. |
Now THAT can get messy, scary, and oh-so- exhilarating. For instance, in 2015 I made the decision to change my trajectory and start nursing school.
I was on my second glass of wine, going through Fundamentals flash cards with one of Ed's aides, and said, "Why didn't I go to nursing school?"
I remember exactly where my mother was when she casually said, "Oh, I always thought you'd be a phenomenal nurse."
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| Accurate Meme |
I immediately bought the NCLEX Mastery app and went to work.
And every damn day was decisive: I made the choice to barrel through those prerequisites, lamenting over every fossa, blood vessel, and nerve plexus; diligently memorizing chemical compounds and muddling through glycolysis.
When the time came, I made the choice to finish the online application for nursing school, agonizing over every missed email from April-May 2016, and gently harassing the application coordinator.
And then the acceptance letter came, and the choices continued.
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| End of first semester clinical. 2016. |
Every day I spent in the lab, in clinicals, every exam (and exam review, god I won't miss those) – these were steps toward the life I chose, for both my family and myself. I learned a new language and developed focused assessment skills. I gave loads of insulin (not at once, obvi). I held a patient's hand when doctors hedged around an eventual diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer.
I also gave an IM in the deltoid that was a little too overeager, and felt that terrible click of hitting her bone.
I almost missed what was potentially femoral thrombosis because the patient said he had fallen earlier and banged his inner thigh.
I felt the color drain from my face one shift when a patient's nephrostomy tubes started gushing blood.
Most recently, I missed my daughter's fractured radius, assuming that because she had full mobility and some swelling that it was just a soft tissue injury (major props to her school nurse for telling me it was a break). She and Phil missed pinning, because her health is the most important thing to me.
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| Our little light is doing fine, and took it like a champ |
Also. Once, in first semester, I didn't clamp the foley catheter bag after emptying it.
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| Urine Trouble, AMIRITE |
And you know what? While I was desperately sopping urine off of the floor with those single-ply brown paper towels, I couldn't stop laughing. Like, hysterically laughing.
Because I chose all this.
I had a miserable high school acting teacher who was verbally abusive, but he taught me one thing: life is full of choices. You make them, and then you make choices after them as a response.
But these choices weren’t ours alone. Nobody lives in a vacuum. We did it not just for ourselves, but for our family.
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| The whole family goes to nursing school. Kiddo's first PPE |
This weekend has been full of joy: from Nurses' Week to my mother's life-saving surgical anniversary to Mother's Day to pinning. I am honored to join my mother not only as a family member, but as a colleague in this highly skilled family of nursing.
And make no mistake: we are a family. A talented, collaborative, smart, messy,
sometimes dysfunctional family. But like any family, we hold some tenets above others:
the importance of working together for a common goal – the care of the patient.
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| Gateway Nursing Class of 2018. Shut up YOU'RE crying |
