My Path to Nursing or What I Finally Decided to Be When I Grew Up

Kim at Emergiblog has asked for nurses to write about their clinical experiences while they were in school, so this post will be strictly nursing and no myeloma.

I went to college right out of high school because all my friends were going. I studied education because, again, all my friends were doing it, and I had no clue what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Along the way, I met Richard, who of course was an education major, but just slightly more committed than I was. We got married in our junior year in college and we both did graduate. He looked for a teaching job and I got pregnant.


Three years later I got pregnant again, this time with twins. Soon I decided I needed something to get me out of the house so I applied for a job as a "nurse's aid" in the local 60 bed rural hospital. I worked mostly 11/7 to cut down on childcare time.

After my kids got older and started school, I worked as a ward secretary and eventually investigated the possibility of going to nursing school. I had a bachelor's in Biology, teaching, and a minor in chemistry, although I had never taught, my teaching certificate was current.I ended up in a BSN program that only required me to take the nursing curriculum since I already had a degree.



We had one clinical day a week. We had to do tons of background on the patients condition, meds, and of course, the care plan. We did the bath and made the bed. No IV's, no Foleys or NGs, a few injections.

I got my real clinical nursing education in that rural hospital. This was the 1970's when out of 60 hospitalized patients, 10 were really sick, but all of them needed some type of care. The nurses who worked there were so smart! They knew a little bit about a lot of things. Most of them worked in many areas; ER, OB, and med-surg. They were real generalists; something that's just not possible today.

Most of the nurses in that rural hospital were diploma trained. They did a lot of clinical while they were in school. But their work was very task oriented. They were organized and skilled at what they did, but they had very little autonomy.

Nursing today is very specialized. It's unreasonable to think that a nurse could graduate ready to start working right away. Hopefully a new nurse will graduate with the ability to do the basic personal care things as well as the ability to think logically and make good decisions.

My daughter is starting the nursing program in January at our local community college. I wish her the best. I love being a nurse.