In 1975 I finished my junior year of high school and was looking for work. I was also approaching a crossroads in my life. In one more year I would graduate from high school and would need to know which way to head with continuing my education. Because of my talent in art I considered strongly pursuing a career in teaching as an art teacher. However this was the year that my grandfather became ill with cancer. I found myself spending the summer helping my grandmother take my grandfather to get his chemo treatments. This meant a 110 mile round trip to a neighboring city. While my grandmother drove I would care for my grandfather who would always get sick. Then as the treatments failed and death became imminent I would take a turn of sitting with him in the hospital. This became my first introduction to the health field and to the role nurses play in the care of the sick. My grandfather would always ask for me whenever I was not there. He told my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother that I was his best nurse. This was the beginning of my desire to help those who are sick.
My first job in the medical field was that of a receptionist in a doctor’s office. I really enjoyed greeting patients and answering the phone, but I wanted to do more. After my grandfather died that fall I decided that I would seek a career in the research of a cure for cancer. My parents were not in a position financially to put me thru school so I sought employments that would provide a means for paying for my education. In the spring of 1976 I applied to become a candy striper at the hospital. I was really excited when my application was accepted. During a time of my life when most teenagers were busy dating I was bringing ice water to patients and providing other bedside comforts. This gave me a chance to see if the medical field was truly something I would want to make a career of. I found volunteering as a candy striper to be very rewarding.
I graduated from High School and started practical nursing classes the summer of 1976. For eleven months I studied hard and worked my practicum of the class. Part way thru the training I started working part time as a nurses aide to help with expenses. Within a week of graduating from Practical Nursing I began working as a floor nurse in a local hospital as a practical nurse. I really enjoyed my new career and made an effort to be a good nurse… always putting my patient first.
A number of years later and having acquired many hours of nursing experience I found myself being on the receiving end for the first time when I gave birth to my first child in 1982. I had never been a patient before and I thought that most nurses and those in the medical field would have the type of work ethic that I had embraced. I was so shocked by the lack of care and poor bedside manners that I found myself grieving for the loss of the image of who I thought nurses were. I remember telling my husband that if the kind of care I received was the kind of care the nursing field was giving their patients then it would be humiliating to tell anyone that I was a nurse. I felt as though the pedestal that I had placed nursing upon had been totally shattered.
This experience and other experiences like it gave me a greater desire to demonstrate to the world what a good nurse was like. Thru out my nursing career I have always put the patient first. I have lived by the motto of “do no harm” in hopes that those under my care would recover promptly and with as little discomfort as possible. Though I am now retired from nursing due to my own personal health issues, my nursing career has been a full one. From working as a pediatric nurse to an office nurse, to medical/surgical and an orthopedic floor nurse, to home health and women’s center, nursing homes, and to doing retinal angiography I always found pride in my work.
Today as I visit Doctor’s offices or receive care from medical professionals, I find that there are few medical personnel who truly put the patient’s needs first. I find it sad that so many of the medical profession are there only for the money. In the current uncertain future of our American medical field we need more than ever caring individuals to enter the field to become our doctors and nurses.
I never made it to becoming a Doctor in the field of Cancer research so as to find a cure, but I have held many hands of the sick and afflicted and I feel that I gave comfort to the ill and to the dying and to their families in their time of need.