I read about a home health care job in the newspaper and said, "Well, that could be OK." One of my first clients was an older lady. When I got to her door, I could see that she was really nervous. I found out that she was paralyzed, although the home health care company had failed to mention that when they sent me out. That first day, she refused to let me help her. I was small, about 5 foot 1 inches tall and 100 pounds, and she demanded to know how I was going to help her get up. I pretended like I knew exactly what I was doing.
Every time I went to her house, she tried to persuade me not to come back, but I refused to quit on her. The turning point in our relationship came when I found out why she didn't want someone as small as me to take care of her.
Years before she had been robbed in her house. The attacker was a young lady about my size, and the attack had left her paralyzed. I had thought she was a bitter old woman who didn't want anyone around. The truth was that she was scared to death. She was lonely. She wanted to trust people. But she had this fear where she wasn't able to.
I kept going back until we formed a relationship. She was extremely kind and caring once I got to know her. I worked in home health care for two years and she was my patient from my first day on the job until she died two months before I quit. I was able to be with her when she died. It was a transforming experience. It showed me that you can change someone's life.
Then I started working as a hospital cardiovascular technician. I ran electrocardiograms and tested blood gas levels. When my pager went off, I had five minutes to report to the ER. One day, they brought in a motor vehicle accident victim who had gotten trapped when her car flipped and caught fire.
Normally, you would draw blood for testing from her arm, but when I tried, her skin came off in my hand. I finally got the blood from the femoral artery. While I was doing that, they brought in two patients from another accident. Both were critical. We hopped from patient to patient trying to stabilize them. We lost the woman who was burned, but we saved the other two.
I would like be an ER nurse when I graduate. I understand there's a huge burnout rate in that job because of the pressure. Burnout is a problem for the nursing profession as a whole; but that happens in a lot of professions, not just nursing. The nursing students talk about the burnout factor with each other.
Our program is very, very intense. There's so much information you have to learn so quickly. I deal with the stress by going to a fitness center near my home. I start with an aerobic workout. Then I do weights. I end with yoga because it makes you relax. There are a lot of other people there letting off the stress, including my roommate.
When I worked as an ER technician, it was chaotic. But it was organized chaos. Everybody knew what they were doing. It was an unspoken thing. You knew where you needed to be and you knew when to get out of the way. When you left for the day, you would think about the ones you saved, and the ones you couldn't save. It was the ones you stabilized, the ones who eventually left the hospital, that kept you going.
