I began learning about nursing the summer I was 14. I was “employed” as a Red Cross Candy Striper volunteer, complete with a blue-and-white jumper and patch,  at an uptown Manhattan, for 75 cents a day lunch money, five days a week.  After a brief orientation which included learning to make a mitred corner on a sheet, feeding a patient, measuring I/O and making a bed with a patient in it, I was assigned to an ENT ward and largely left to my own devices with the mini pediatric subward there, as the children  spoke Spanish, the  staff didn’t and I did, albeit as a third language. However, summers end and students return to school.

The next step of my education was a decade later, after some graduate coursework in the MBA/MPH track, as a night shift administrator at a busy midtown hospital emergency room. Like Forrest Gump, I was there for history; I was on duty the night they brought John Lennon in. It was an  intense atmosphere and I loved it, but I drifted away from health care again, becoming disillusioned upon realizing that the successful administrator was the manager who could most successfully break out expenses for reimbursement by third-party payers. I  spent the next several years utilizing my language skills, teaching English and French, and proofreading.

Then one day, I saw a documentary about the Fistula Foundation and the work they were doing in Africa, and I knew that it was time to become a nurse at last and finish what I started as a teenager. I was fortunate to have taken STEM courses for my original Bachelor’s degree and had only a few pre- and co-requisites when I was accepted for the AAS program at City Tech. I kept my day job proofreading concomitantly  for economic reasons.

As a visual and kinesthetic learner, I concentrated on textbooks,  question books and clinicals. I studied with my classmates and found it helpful as long as everyone showed up prepared. We could divide up the work and teach each other. The most important lessons that I learned though, were those regarding scope of practice. I was awed and amazed at how much nurses actually do for clients. I feel as if APIE has been emblazoned on my heart.

I continued with the Bachelor’s program primarily because operating room nurses, my aspired-to job, need a BSN, but the most valuable lesson I have taken from my classes is the realization of how rapidly nursing is evolving and advancing, and have made sure to join NYSNA, ANA, and AORN to begin to set myself up as a lifeling learner regardless of whether I continue with graduate nursing studies or not.