When I was 14 years old, my younger brother who was only 11 at the time, ended up in the hospital for about a month. His appendix had burst and toxins were being spread throughout his abdomen. After two different hospitals, four different surgeries and countless emotions ranging from hopeful to dread, he eventually came home. He had lost too much weight and sported two new scars across his abdomen. The doctors were shocked that he recovered the way he did. Luckily to this day, he has no deficits due to the surgeries. Watching your 11 year old brother fight for his life instead of fighting with you like any other typical day was life altering. One day, I asked my brother what made the biggest difference while he was in the hospital. His response was the nurses.
He said that the nurses who truly cared, who showed compassion, who understood all his feelings and emotions, helped to improve his health while the nurses who showed no compassion and rough handled him just to get their job done actually made him feel worse. They made him wonder if he was ever going to recover. In that moment, I knew I wanted to be a nurse.
For most of my life, I wanted to be a teacher just like my mother. I loved every aspect of teaching and I still do. After everything that happened with my brother, I became fascinated with the medical world and all it could offer. I looked deeper into nursing and quickly fell in love with everything about it. To this day, I am still falling in love with nursing. I often still wish I could be a teacher in a school and maybe one day I can become a nursing teacher. Luckily, being a nurse allows me to teach my patients every day. It allows me to make a difference in someone's life even just for a 12 hour shift. That's what I love about nursing. I know how my brother felt and I knew that's what I wanted to do for others.
Making a difference in someone else's life is the one of the best feelings in the world. Now that I have gotten more involved in nursing through school and through work, I have found that the only thing better than making a difference in someone's life is the difference they make in your life. Although I have not even finished nursing school, I have had a handful of experiences with my patients who have made a difference to my life. It can be a simple thank you from the cancer patient who has been just plain mean or it can be the little boy asking for his momma when he wakes up from surgery. Whatever it is, they make a difference to me. They make me remember why I do what I do. They make me remember why I work hard and put in countless, tiring hours every day. They make it all worth it.
So as much as I want to make a difference in someone else's life, I also look forward to the differences they make in my life. I don't want to be a nurse for the money or the fame. I want to be a nurse for all the differences that can be made. There is something about differences being made in the person who is sick or at a weak point in their health. There's something about making a difference to the person who experiences countless emotions ranging from hopeful to dread, and that's why I want to be a nurse.
