When your nurse walks into your room and introduces herself there is usually some simple exchange of words, a shallow introduction to ease the anxieties of being in the hospital. Getting poked and prodded by people you don’t know is somehow always less indecent when there is a shallow conversation. Many times the question “what made you decide to be a nurse?” get thrown out there as a quick topic starter. As your nurse is spiking saline bags, organizing your meds, counting blood tubes, she ponders if she feels like giving the whole story or a simplified version.
You see for most of us who are nurses we are keenly aware that the percentage of nurses who experienced trauma prior to becoming a nurse is huge. Most of us come from abusive childhoods, neglectful relationships, traumatic accidents, the foster system, had parents who drank, etc. Recent studies have even supported this that looking at college freshman and applicants nursing students tended to have an increased level of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as compared to other students in differing departments. For those who are not in healthcare or social work, ACE’s are experiences that are traumatic that add up and give a “score”. Basically the higher your score, the more likely you are to have certain physical and mental health issues into adulthood.
There are two answers to “why did you become a nurse?”. For most of us the answer is “because we care”, this is only surface level. Most of us have a reason if not very specific reasons for why we are (usually attached to a trauma) but that, is why we became nurses. Heres why I am a nurse 🙂
When I was eight years old, August 11, 2008 to be exact, my mom picked me up from my after-school program. Looking back it is so unreal how much detail I remember of my day. My mom was a real estate agent at the time and she would constantly be late to pick me up, or would get me but have to take a phone call and we would sit at the daycare for a while, you get the idea. That day I remember playing in the “gym” as you would call it with my friends and we were playing a game. We took the gyms mats that you would use for nap time and placed them at various points around the gym. We put people in chairs and were pushing them around like they were in an “ambulance”. Anyways the whole point of the game was to take someone off their mat at the site of their “accident” put them in a chair and push them to the “hospital” in the ambulance as fast as you could. We were racing to see who could get more people to the “hospital” the quickest. Where we came up with this I have no idea but I remember being so annoyed when my mom came to get me. She picked up me and I had to leave the game, then she got a phone call in the lobby. How long we sat there for I don’t know, but it was long enough for me to be mad about her being on the phone and was starting to get impatient.
When we got in the car we drove about a mile before being hit by someone. Whether he was drunk, fell asleep at the wheel, I don’t really remember that part. I don’t remember anything from the moments of it actually happening. To be quite honest I don’t even remember leaving the after school program. I remember sitting on the hallway floor looking up at my mom on the phone with a client and then I remember waking up in my own vomit in the car. It was “olympics” day at the program and I saw my participation certificate on the floor of the car. I also very clearly remember thinking how odd it was that I felt like I could still see the powder from my powdered donuts at snack time in my puke. Again, the observations of an eight year old. How I got out of the car I’m not entirely sure but I did and sat under a tree with a nice lady whose name I don’t remember. Apparently we crashed right into the front yard of their pretty house, in my mind it’s white but I could be making that up.
The next thing I remember after that I was rolled into the trauma bay at York Hospital eventually along with my mom. We talked briefly stretcher to stretcher and then she was taken elsewhere. I was lying there with a neck brace on that was very uncomfortable and I kept wanting to pee but they would only let me use a bedpan at the time. That I didn’t understand. My step brother and my grammy came to the hospital and stayed with me. I know there were other people there but I really only remember my step brother for some reason. When he finally got to go home, I was sitting in the back of his car with a bruised eye and cast on my arm. I sat in the backseat and I asked him how long he had been driving for. I was nervous about getting in the car again but didn’t want to say anything.
After that became the rest of my childhood life which was filled with visits to nursing homes, long car rides to Hershey medical center, my mom in and out of recoveries from various surgeries, etc. August 11 was the accident and from what I remember the first time she came home was December. It’s all very blurry but I remember writing on the computer and saving the document and it was December 12th. She had two complex broken hip fractures and a pelvis fracture as well as other injuries. Complications from being in the hospital and in various long term care facilities over the years would come back and cause more problems. It was a vicious cycle that went on for a pretty long time actually.
I decided I wanted to be a pediatric orthopedic surgeon the day my mom got her hip replaced when I was eight years old. I was fascinated by the doctor at Hershey Medical center that let me see the imaging and showed me his tools. I don’t remember much about that conversation but my grandma does. As the years rolled by, having a single mom, we were obviously closer just because there wasn’t always a male figure there. If she would get sick in the middle of the night, or needed medication I was often the one that woke up and offered to help. I remember standing next to her home health nurse and learning how to change a wound vac dressing. I learned how to give her shots in her stomach, and I learned which muscle relaxer she could take “and still function” as she would say, and which one “makes her drool”. I learned the side of healthcare at a very young age that is not glamorized. The slow side of rehabilitation, healing that comes with unexpected setbacks and the world of little wins. Slowly, I lost interest in cutting people open and developed an interest in connecting with people along their healing journey.
The reason I am a nurse is because I care. I learned how to care in a capacity that many people do not learn until their parent grow old and are unable to care for themselves. Some people don’t ever get to learn that care. While I do not look back on this experience as “traumatic” or “a bad part of my childhood” I do recognize that it wasn’t ideal and did have an effect on me. I can’t help but ponder my life experiences and take that into consideration when looking at why I chose the career path I did. I don’t by any means regret my childhood or wish it was different but, I do see patterns where I was the one doing the caring when I should’ve been the one being cared for. Often I can’t help by allow the thought to pop in my head that my life experiences made me incapable of not caring. My first instinct like many other nurses, is to care. Overtime we may get burnt out by the system, or dull to the raw emotions but, most of us came into this for the same reasons.
We came here because caring for others is what we know how to do. Not only do we know how to do it but we are kind of good at it? We caught on to comforting people before the textbooks. We resonated with the feeling of satisfaction after helping someone feel better. Sometimes we care for others better than we care for ourselves, we know this. But yet we will continue to care.
Rhae 🙂
Now What? 
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