A couple of nights ago I woke from a dream that left me feeling unsettled for a moment. I was back in the nursing school lobby during an huge orientation for the new incoming students, and was summoned to “talk” with the nursing program director. She asked what I’d been doing since getting my nursing license, and as soon as I started to tell her, she lost interest. I was “that one” who didn’t go into a hospital to work, bringing down the perfect 100% placement rate for the school.
Even though I never planned to work in a hospital, theres a lot of expectation that this is the successful route.
Even though we learned about dozens of different roles we could become as a nurse, the one I chose is as far out of the box as it gets.
In the year since becoming a nurse, I developed and taught a course on health advocacy to help people navigate the healthcare system as well as a class on elder care and end-of-life care. I’ve been asked recently to teach a portion of my Death & Dying course for another school in the fall, and that feels really good.
Standing under a canvas canopy while summer monsoon winds picked up around us, I taught students from our remote medicine intensive about prolonged field care, and how they would use the equipment they had on hand to help someone who’d been injured when higher care was not an option. It was my first toe-dip into austere nursing, and there was so much to talk about!
Later I traveled for two weeks to teach remote medicine to the ShoPai tribe in northern Nevada. Tribal members learned how to take pulses, to identify a life-threatening bleed, how to stop it, what to do if a rattlesnake bit someone … and we ended our time together making herbal medicines with honey, with butter, with supplies stocked from the only grocery store for 100 miles in either direction from their town. We talked about how to make changes in health when there isn’t much available, and how to do it without getting discouraged.
I left Nevada on a high that carried over until I returned home to teach another intensive where we talked about making medicine more accessible and more sustainable in a world where many people can’t afford it, and others don’t have the funds to learn it. This summer I made ginger chai with students, helped them navigate wildcrafting lambsquarter to make plant protein powder from, talked about making hydrotherapy foot baths for our elders & stressed loved ones, and the same refrain came up over and over again.
“I want you to be ok. To know what to do when you don’t have everything you need. To work with what you have and be able to do the best you can with that”….
I didn’t end up working in med surgical unit this year, or the ER or even the surgery suite that captivated me. I did however end up working with people from all over the country, talking about preventative health, teaching skills to keep them safe, help them cope when they wouldn’t be safe, and most importantly, to be ok in the face of stress or harm. We did two successful free community clinics that were packed from start to finish in our area. Students learned how to take blood sugar readings, how to tape sprained ankles enough to walk out with, how to make their food healthier and their medicine stronger with what was available to them.
So don’t worry if your path doesn’t immediately look like what it was supposed to on paper. It doesn’t always look that way!
Nursing didn’t end up being exactly what I was taught. It ended up being so much better.