Rough Draft

Alexandra Sperli

English 3060J

Professor Oweidat

24 April 2014

How Nursing has Impacted my Life

            The question of what do I want to be when I grow up runs through every little kids minds. In pre school and kindergarten I remember wanting to be a dog or a princess, kids imaginations are so big!  As you move on to elementary school your ideas might change to becoming a professional athlete, at least that’s what mine was. I just started playing tennis around this time and I absolutely loved the sport. Then came middle school, at this time I dreamed of being a movie star on Disney channel. Their lives seemed so fun all the time. As I got older and understood that I can’t be an animal and there is not a high chance of becoming a professional athlete or a movie star so I needed some other options. I started to think about nursing.

I watched all these medical shows with my mom, like Greys anatomy, ER, and house. These television shows really caught my attention. They were intriguing, interesting and pretty graphic and disgusting, but I kept up with the seasons. The blood, bones, and needles did not bother me one bit. I did get a little grossed out looking at the skin diseases but its nothing that I couldn’t get used too. What really caught my attention in these shows was how the nurses were compassionate, responsible, knowledgeable and caring about their patients. The doctors would just write a prescription and be on their way.

I am a very compassionate person, I always have been. I put others before myself and always want to make sure everyone is happy. I like seeing smiles on people’s faces. There are too many good things in this world to not smile about. I am also very responsible. I have been babysitting kids since I was in middle school, people must think I am responsible to be able to leave their kids home with me. I am knowledgeable, but I am not a person that someone would say wow she is really smart, she always gets good grades or school comes so easy to her. I have to work really hard to get the grades I receive. But that’s another aspect about nursing, being a hard worker. Nurses just don’t sit around at a desk all day they are always working to meet their patients goals.

I am not the type of person who can just sit around all day or sit at a desk and do paper work. I love being on my toes, moving around. I like to be active and as a nurse you always have to be on your toes, you never know what’s going to happen the next second. It could be anything from your patient needing a cup of water to your patient needing to be shocked because their heart stopped pumping.

When I was a junior in high school I shadowed an ER nurse at the Cleveland clinic. This was an amazing experience! I got to see nurses in action. Patients were coming in with all different kinds of issues. It really opened my eyes to what nurses do. They all work as a team to make sure their patients is getting the right medications, the right medications on time and making sure their patients are comfortable. Having this expiernce made me want to do my senior project at University Hospitals in Cleveland. I shadowed a Pediatric nurse for three weeks. This was one of the best projects I could have ever been involved with. One I love working with kids, they are so spirited, energetic and their minds are always turning.  And two I learned how to use an otoscope, watched strep tests get done, watched injections, and learned how to do an assessment on an well and sick patient. The list of how much knowledge I obtained could go on and on. This nurse I shadowed took me under her wing and made the end of my senior year even better because my eyes got opened to a profession I know that I 100% want to do for the rest of my life.

Summer going into my freshman year of college I got accepted into a nursing summer scholars program. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was leaving my high school friends five weeks earlier than I had too, but my parents encouraged me to go ahead and do the program. Me and ten other girls spent five weeks taking a biology course, a Health science and professions course and a Nursing 101 course.  It was really cool getting to know my way around campus and getting close with the nursing professors. As I went through the summer taking these courses it made me want to become a nurse even more. I learned about how nursing got started by Florence Nightingale and the basics of what the practice or nursing consisted of.

As the school year approached I had my class schedule all ready to go. I was taking chemistry, biology, math and English. My biology and chemistry classes were very tricky and I had to take two biology classes and three chemistry classes, and those were only pre requisites to the nursing program. I remember thinking to myself what am I getting myself into. As freshman year started coming to an end, it was time to apply to the nursing school. This application had to be perfect. I think I redid it at least five times, it had to be perfect. My heart was racing just walking my application to the nursing office. That application is what was the key to my future.

That summer I got the best news ever. I got accepted to the Ohio University Nursing School. I remember waking up to an email from the head of the nursing school and the name of it was: You’ve been accepted. I screamed I was so excited. When I told my parents their faces lit up with happiness, they told me how proud they were of me and that all my hard work and dedication paid off. That feeling of feeling so accomplished is something I wanted to last forever. I couldn’t wait to start my journey at Ohio University in the nursing school.

Sophomore year came around and I was enrolled in pathophysiology, clinical judgment II and health assessment. Pathophysiology is the study of diseases. This class was very interesting and challenging. I remember all of my classmates and I being so nervous because this was our first big nursing class and we have to receive an 80% or above in order to move on the next semester to more nursing classes. Every exam, and quiz we had so much anxiety because every point mattered. I got past this semester with all A’s in my nursing classes. It was a great feeling and I could imagine what next semester would bring me.

Fall semester came around and I was enrolled in Pharmacology, Clinical Judgment III, foundations of nursing, Diversity & Ethics, and then also gerontology. This was going to be a heavy load of classes. Pharmacology was my favorite we learned about all different kinds of medicines. We learned their brand name, generic name, their adverse effects, what patients should and should not take them and how to contradict the drugs action if needed too. It was a whole lot of information to soak up. We also started our first clinical rotation this semester. We went to the laurels nursing home right here in Athens.  We had lab one week, where we learned different techniques and got checked off on them to make sure we knew exactly what we were doing and then the other week we went to the nursing home. We got to follow around the nurses and participate in hands on things like giving bed baths, passing meds, helping our patients be fed, and sometimes we got to do a tube feeding which was very interesting. This is also where I gave my first injection. This was so scary! I remember my hands were shaking and I had to take a deep breath, and run through all the steps in my head that I learned from lab and did it perfectly. I remember that day like it was yesterday, it made me feel like an actual nurse. I called my parents the next day and they were congratulating me and telling me how proud they were and how happy it made them that I was so happy. I was never nervous again to give my patients an injection. I will remember these patients forever and how much help us nursing students gave to these older people. I learned so much and it made me even more excited to get to do clinicals in the hospitals around Athens junior year.

Junior year final arrived. This year was the year that nursing students above my nursing class said that this year would be hell.  This year my schedule had Nursing Care of Adults I, also known as med surge, clinical judgment V and Research & Evidence based practice. Last year all we heard about was how hard med surge was and how the professor was so tough, so with that all in mind I went to my first med surge class with a pit in my stomach. As we all could have guessed this class is going to be taking up a lot of our time. We also did a clinical rotation on the med surge floor; mine was at the hospital Holzer in Gallipolis. This semester in lab we learned how to use sterile technique, how to insert a catheter, put in an IV and how to take care of a tracheostomy. I got to try my first IV at Holzer and my first catheter. As the semester went on I kept working my butt off to maintain a B average in my med surge class. This semester was like a roller coaster of emotions for me. One day I would be happy and loving nursing school and the next I was stressing, wanting to pull my hair because of the med surg. It came down to the end of the semester and finals were just around the corner, at this point I had an 83% in med surge, all my other classes I had A’s. My study guide for med surge was 50 pages long. I prepared so far in advance for this exam and I thought I knew the material well. What happened after that final put my nursing career on hold.

I did not pass med surg. I missed it by 2 percentage points. I remember I was at the play Wicked with my mom when I checked to see if I passed and I didn’t. I felt like my whole world was crashing down. I have worked this hard all semester and throughout my past years to not pass a class by 2 percentage points. I had to stop and take a lot of deep breaths because I was a wreck. I couldn’t stop crying. I emailed my professors and the head of the nursing department to see if I could review my exam to see where I went wrong, and no one responded. I had no idea what to do. I felt lost. I felt like I let my parents down. I just kept thinking to myself now I have to be a 5^th year college student. I had to figure out what the next step was by myself because no one called or emailed me back until the week before we were to start spring semester. I had chosen to minor in business, so spring semester I would no longer be in any nursing classes I would be taking classes towards my business minor. I was not looking forward to spring semester to say the least.

Its now spring semester of my junior year of college. It took me a long time to get over the fact that I was not in the nursing program anymore. I have to reapply and hope to get in next year. I will be a 5^th year and I will be watching my friends that I have been with me in nursing since freshman year move on while I don’t. This experience made me learn a lot. I learned that my parents will always be there standing by my side, helping me over those bumps in the road and that they are proud of me. They know I worked hard and that’s all they can ever ask for. And lastly I learned that if you really want something you cant sit around and mope, you take that anger, sadness, frustration and use it to fuel you to keep making your dreams become a reality. I know I want to become a nurse, and in a few years that’s right where I will be.