Admittedly, I probably started out this blog on the wrong foot…blogging about death and dying and all that goes along with it isn't the greatest beginning, but that's just where I was at the time, so there you have it.

So let's start anew, shall we?

For starters, I never wanted to be a nurse.  It was never even on my radar.  When I was young, I loved animals, and like all young children who have a love for animals, I thought that someday I would be a veterinarian.  And that really didn't change until late into my junior year of high school, right about the time when I had to start thinking about college and what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.  As the years had passed from childhood into adolescence, I started to develop allergies to animals.  First it was cats, which I wasn't too upset about because I didn't really like cats anyway (still don't, to tell you the truth).  And then it was rodents (I had pet rats, who I absolutely adored).  And then it was horses, dogs, cows, rabbits…basically anything with hair.  Being allergic to animals, highly allergic in some cases, would probably not bode well for a veterinarian.  How could I adequately care for my patients if I was allergic to them?  Okay, on to Plan B.  Marine Biology…I could do that…none of those animals have hair…totally doable.  Except…I'm allergic to mold, which shares several allergenic properties with algae, which is everywhere in the water.  Fail again.  On to Plan C then, I guess?  I very, very briefly dabbled with the idea of becoming a doctor.  I even became a member of the Mayo Explorers, which was an educational group sponsored by the Boy Scouts whose goal was to introduce high school students to different careers in the medical field.  One day a week for a few months, I would go to the Mayo Clinic with a bunch of other high schoolers, and a bunch of doctors would come and talk to us and tell us about what they did.  In some cases, we even got to go to the hospital and see where they do MRI scans, what the operating room looked like (we got to practice scrubbing in for a surgery, which was pretty cool--to be clear, there was no patient being operated on, it was all pretend), and we got to see what an average patient room looked like on the medical floors and the ICU (ICU was terrifying).  We even got to put a breathing tube in our mouths to see what it felt like for a patient on a ventilator.  We got to see and do some pretty cool stuff.  So I thought maybe I would become a doctor.  Until I found out how long and how expensive schooling is to become a doctor.  Best case scenario, assuming everything went according to plan, would have me practicing as an actual doctor, on my own, in my early 30's.  Do you know how old a 32 year-old person is to a 17 year-old?  Ancient!  I thought those 22 year-old guys who still went to high school parties were old.  I couldn't wrap my head around being in school and in training for that long.  So I was stumped.  Enter the high school Guidance Counselor.

I had met with Tom a couple times my junior year, and when I mentioned veterinary school and medical school, and a few of my hangups with both of those careers, he gently steered me in the direction of nursing.  I was confused at first…I had been hospitalized exactly once in my life at that point, and all I really remembered of my nurses is that they were the ones who brought me popsicles, helped me to bathe, and emptied the pee out of the little receptacle that sits in the toilet.  Why in the world would I want to do that?  And why do I have to go to school for four years to do it?  He explained to me that nursing opens a lot of doors to various careers in the medical field, and he explained it in such a way that it made me realize that maybe I had the wrong idea about what nurses actually did.  So, I thought to myself, why the heck not.  I'll give it a shot, and if I don't like it, I'm sure there will be some other career path that might be interesting.

Being the scared, shy little person that I was in high school (I know, most of you will not believe that about me, but I truly was!), I decided on a university that was close to home…a 45-minute drive away from my parents' front door, to be exact.  I was far enough away to do my own thing, yet close enough to easily find a way home if I needed to.  And the school that I chose seemed to have a really reputation for its nursing program.  It's possible that I'm not remembering everything correctly, after all, it's been over 10 years since I graduated from college, but I really remember enjoying my classes those first two years of school.  I even enjoyed most of my nursing classes, but not as much as my general education classes.  You know what they say about 4-year college students being more well-rounded?  I understood that by the end of my four years there.  And I'm not saying that I'm better than anyone else and I don't think that anyone with a 2-year degree is any less than me, but I really enjoyed taking those classes that had absolutely nothing to do with my course of study.  They were fun, they were informational, and I'm just thankful that I had the time and the energy to stick out for four years for those classes.  Looking back, those extracurricular classes are still some of my favorites.  I wish I could say the same for the nursing classes.

I'm not going to get too far into it, but I didn't like my nursing program.  I didn't find it to be overly challenging, and by the time I was ending my junior year of college, I still didn't have a good handle on what nurses actually did.  I actually considered dropping out of the nursing program after my junior year to pursue a biology degree, or something that would get me on the path to pursing one or more of my original interests…veterinary science or becoming a doctor.  I was stressed out, I was somewhat depressed, and I was afraid that I had just wasted three years of college on a degree that I wasn't sure I was even going to like…at all.  At the advice of my mom, I got a job the summer after junior year of college at a dog shelter, just to see if working with animals was still something that I might want to do.  She told that me not to drop out of nursing school, but to give it the summer to think about it.  Luckily for me, I also got a nursing internship at the Mayo Clinic the summer between junior and senior year, and everything changed.  There I was, working on the nursing unit amongst men and women who were fantastic role models and excellent examples of who a nurse really is and what they contribute to the medical field and to patient care.  My eyes were opened and it was good.  Fortunately, the dog shelter gig actually pushed me away from pursuing a career in veterinary science.  There were days when I would go directly to the dog shelter after working a shift at the hospital, and what a drastic difference between the two places.