Nurses Week 2025. We put the "fun" in "dysfunctional"!

I always say that I never wanted to be a nurse when I was little, but somewhere in the oldest of my memory banks, I do have a memory of playing with a little dress-up nurse "costume" when I was little. If I remember correctly, it had the little white nurse's cap and a blue cape.  Maybe a little case to go with it.  I had the feeling that it had been, like, my Mom's, or something?  Maybe not, but I don't think it was new to me. It might have been something that had been new to my sister. Most of the toys that had anything to do with dolls or dressing up or anything, for lack of a better term, "girly" would've been hand-me-downs from my sister.  

And I also remember that one year for Christmas, I received the little "doctor" kit. I think it's by Fisher Price? The one with the little toy stethoscope and BP cuff and syringe and I don't remember what else.  One of the doctors at work has one in his office now.  The stethoscope really worked. 

When I was a senior in high school, I decided I was going to go to school to be a medical assistant after I graduated.  I knew I wanted to do something in healthcare but didn't know what, and that was a quick program.  I could get my foot in the door and figure it out from there, I supposed. 

But, that never happened.  A month before we graduated, I was in a car accident (you know what, that was actually exactly 32 years ago yesterday) and I spiraled downward quickly thereafter.  Physically, I mean I didn't end up in the hospital nor did I break any bones. I was T-boned on the driver's side (someone ran a stop sign and hit my car) and I hit my head on the driver's side window, and I was all kinds of sore for a long time afterward.  I used to have all the medical records but they washed away in The Flood of 2020.  I had an abnormal EEG afterward and had to go to physical therapy and saw a neurologist and had MRIs and CT scans and TENS therapy treatments and sued the guy and a few years later got some money.  My first car and love of my life at the time, my 1977 Maverick, was totalled.  I got addicted to pain killers and muscle relaxers and fell into a deep depression, and ended up not going to college for anything at all.  But THAT, my friends, is another story.

A few years later, actually it wasn't even that many years later, it just feels like it for all the unwise decisions I made in the interim... anyway, a while later I found myself ready to pull myself out of the muck in which I had fallen and ready to retry the whole Responsible Adult thing again.  I found a program at a local nursing home where they'd put you through Nursing Assistant Certification class if you worked for them for a certain amount of time.  Why not, I thought.  Healthcare was still calling me.  

So I did it. I became an NA/R, which was early 90's Minnesotan for Nursing Assistant, Registered.  I worked in a locked dementia unit at a nursing home for my first job.  I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it, either.  I wasn't sure it was my calling, but it was better than working retail.  

I'm not going to go through every month of my employment history for you. This isn't my frickin' resume.  (You can find that on LinkedIn. ha! ha!)  I'll just skip along and say that as a CNA -- sorry, as an NA/R in Minnesota, I worked in a couple of nursing homes, and I also worked as a Home Health Aide.  I really enjoyed working in home health, except that I was putting a LOT of miles on my vehicle at the time (which was a 1984 VW Vanagon pop-top weekender...) which was not cool.  We didn't have a good vehicle to drive the crap out of at that time.  I mean, the Vanagon was a good vehicle, and funner than heck to drive, but I didn't want to pile 100+ miles on it every day.  

Wait, am I talking about nursing, or cars? I forgot for a second. ;)

I said I wasn't going to write out the loooooooong version of my resume here, which is what I ended up doing. Two days later and, delete, delete, delete.  The short story version is, I worked as a CNA in the mid-90's, then switched careers for a minute, then married my hubby and had the boy and became a stay-at-home Mom for a while, and then a couple minutes later, decided to go "back" to nursing school.  

Nursing school was Hell.  I used to think it was the worst time of my life, but now I can most confidently say it is NOT the worst thing I have been through.  This is worth saying, so I'm going to leave this part in.  You see, as far as school goes, I was used to not having a problem with it.  I breezed through elementary school like nothing; the work was never hard, the tests were always easy, I loved learning and always got the best grades and toward the end of those years, my teachers were saying I could go to Harvard if I wanted.  Then middle school hit, and school got challenging.  And I had never been challenged in school before, so I retreated into things other than school.  When the going got tough, I got outta there. Mentally, anyway.  By the time I recovered and realized I just had to "apply myself", I was midway through my junior year of high school and, while it was too late to recover all of the academic damage I had done (no more Harvard in my sights...) I did manage to get good grades again and redeem myself, at least in my mind, as Someone Who Could Accomplish Something If I Put My Mind To It.  That was big at that point in my life, but that's another story.  

I tell you this because by the time I hit nursing school, I was in my 30s and had been out of school for a while, but my experience with it was that it could be hard but if I just stuck to it and focused and worked hard, I could do it.  

Insert laughter here.

Generals were pretty much like that. And then I hit the core nursing classes, the ones that meant the most, the ones I knew would be the foundation on which the rest of my life (well, my nurse life anyway) would be grown, and testing went just like this:

And if you got the wrong answer, you were DONE.  

I never had test anxiety until nursing school.  That is why I cried almost every other day.  That is why I wanted to drop out almost every other week.  It was the longest two years of my life.  I can't tell you what all happened those two years because I don't remember it.  It was a blur.  A blur of books and papers and tears and some alcohol may have been involved, too.  And I made a few friends whom I will always cherish because without them, I would NOT have stuck with it and graduated on time.  Somehow with honors.  But I tell you what, during those two years of nursing school, my Dad had open-heart surgery and my beloved dog Portia died, and my husband's grandparents died, and one of my ponies died, and I don't know what else happened in our family but it was rough. And the only thing that had to matter was nursing school.  It was crazy.  I don't know if I'd do it again.  

Anyway.  The whole working in nursing experience has been interesting for me.  As a CNA, I've worked in nursing homes, both in the "general" population (for lack of a better term" and on the locked dementia units that they now like to call "memory care".  I've worked in home health and in hospice.  I've worked primarily with adults although I did have a couple of peds patients back in the home health days.  And then I worked in the hospital, on med-surg and very occasionally helping out in the ER as a CNA.  As a nurse, I worked first in med-surg and then I cross-trained to OB and post-partum, and to the ER, and charge nurse, and sometimes I got to work in the PACU which was an interesting change.  In nursing school, I always thought I wanted to work in the OR, but that chance has never really come up -- or when it has, I've not felt like it was my true calling, after all.  I've worked all three shifts: days, PMs, and nights.  The hospital where I worked was just getting into 12-hour shifts when I left, but I kinda liked the 12-hour shifts.  It was nice to work your ass off and then be done for a while.  

And now, as you probably now, I've been at a specialty care outpatient clinic for the last 9+ years. In neurology.  Epilepsy, to be more precise.  Sometimes I get asked if I chose epilepsy for any specific reason -- and my answer is, nope!  It just worked out this way.  I was half-heartedly looking for another job and even though I didn't have neuro experience, I applied for this one, and I was offered the job the same day I interviewed.  And here we are!

So, that's a little summation of my nursing experience.  What I do on a daily basis now is so different from what I used to do working in the hospital, but it's just as hard.  Don't ever let anyone tell you that clinic nurses have it easy, because we most certainly do NOT. Being a nurse is hard, no matter where we work.  

I know, all jobs can be hard.  I'm not trying to belittle other jobs.  Everyone has their calling, and I do believe mine is in nursing.  I know it's not in construction, or teaching, or sales, or a number of other things it could that just don't make me feel warm and fuzzy and fulfilled while also allowing me to support my family the way nursing does.  I feel fortunate to have a career where I can be myself and try to help straighten out chaos and help others understand complicated things.  

So, if any of my fellow nurses (including, of course, nursing students, nursing assistants, nurse practitioners, retired nurses, etc.) are reading this -- I hope you celebrated yourself somehow this week!  Nurses are awesome people and most of the non-nurse people we know wouldn't last ten minutes at our jobs. I'd say more, but my break is over and I have to get back to work now 😇😜