20 THINGS I WISH SOMEONE HAD TOLD ME ABOUT BECOMING A NURSE

Having some inside information from someone who’s been there themselves can make the journey a little less intimidating. 

1. Nursing doesn’t just involve patient care.  You can be a nurse and work in hospital management or the field of education.  You can help to sell medical equipment used by hospitals, and there are also important roles in medical insurance and medical law which require the specialty of a nurse.
2. Working as a nurse can bring out the most extreme of emotions.  You might go from mourning the loss of a patient that you had grown close to, to singing from the mountain tops as a patient who was not expected to make it being well enough to go home. This is likely to happen in the same day, maybe even the same hour.
3. You will make such a difference in so many people’s lives, on a daily basis.  Even walking through a grocery store, you might be stopped by someone who remembers you at their bedside giving them hope when they needed it the most.
4. Oh, the places you’ll go! You’ll have the opportunity to travel around the world assisting those who need your care, while also getting to experience different countries and cultures.
5. Nursing lets you work in all sorts of environments; from caring for newborn infants taking their first breath, to providing comfort to an elderly person taking their last.
6. You may end up working in various medical settings – a private practice, a public clinic or school, a business, or even making home visits to the public.
7. Make no mistake – nursing school is hard.  You will learn that answers do not always come quickly, but when the first patient tells you that you’ve made a difference, it will all be worth it.
8. Helping someone who was never supposed to walk again take their first steps, or being there when someone born deaf hears their first sound will cause you to cry – and that’s okay.
9. Sometimes, holding a patient’s hand is all that a nurse needs to do.
10. Portrayal of the medical field on TV shows like House, ER and Grey’s Anatomy are not real!  (After all, there aren’t even any nurses on House!)
11. If you talk about “the patient with anal atresia” at the dinner table, your seven-year-old child will go to school the next day and talk about it at Show & Tell. (True story!)
12. When you walk into a crowd of people, you can’t resist diagnosing everyone as they walk by.
13. Friends, neighbors, and even people that you’ve never met will ask you to diagnose their rash.
14. When one of your children has a headache, you are sure that he or she has some rare type of cancer that you just studied.
15. You will learn to identify smells that one does not even want to talk about.
16. On that note, you will learn that one can get really excited about the color of various bodily emissions.
17. Just when you think you have heard it all, you haven’t, because you’re going back to work tomorrow.
18. You’ll learn that some people have 48 hours off in a row, and they call it a weekend.
19. You will begin to love talking about rare diseases, while your friends and family will stand there with a glazed look on their face, horrified at the story you just told.
20. When you go to work every day, you are reminded that there are a lot of people in the world who need to be cared for, and you will be thankful that you have the honor of caring for them.