The alarm goes off at 4.30am. "What was I thinking?",was my first thought. But as painful as it was I dragged myself out of my warm bed and was on the road by 5.15am arriving of the floor of one of the cities children's hospital by 6am. How did I get here, well that's a story too.
In 1994 I arrived in the States from the UK due to my husbands job. With small children I was not too interested in working and to be honest a little burned out from nursing in a badly run socialized health care system in England, where patient acuity was high, staffing and resources always low. however, after 6 months it became apparent that I needed to work for financial and sanity reasons. That's when the battle started. To gain a current US nursing license I had to jump through many hoops some that brought me to tears of frustration. Many times, I felt like giving up, actually tried doing a few different things but none of them fulfilled me like nursing did.
I used to joke that I came into nursing to "Hold hands and wipe bottoms." There is a truth in that, I am immensely edified by the relationships I stumble upon in nursing, the staff, the patients and the family members. The human contact, often at a time in someones life when they are most vulnerable is a view to the human soul not everyone has the opportunity to experience.
So, several years, many exams, lost paperwork (by the state board of nursing), foreign nurse exam and the dreaded NCLEX I was finally given a license to nurse in the state of Pennsylvania. Nursing again became a passion but eventually after getting myself firmly in love with community nursing I wanted to do more, I wanted to know more. I enrolled in an accelerated Masters program. Almost 4 years later (yes I took the slow poke route), I graduated with an MSN, a proud day.
Almost a year later, still pondering how to fully maximize the huge investment of gaining my Masters, I saw an advert in a local nursing magazine for a clinical instructor for the pediatric module at a Philadelphia University. I applied and 10 days later I was hired!! There started a series of faculty meeting where I constantly told myself "I can't do this!". How does a British trained nurse from the 80's relate and speak into the lives of nursing students who belong to the millennial generation and whom may not be able to relate to me culturally, generationally and professionally. I had never really worked in an acute setting in the States, still do not understand the US educational system and understand the health care system even less!!
But I kept remembering when I first arrived in the States and was told I could not nurse immediately, how heartbroken I was. In those days all I wanted was a nursing license, how here I was, a masters prepared nurse about to influence the next generation of nurses. I could not have dreamed this big for myself, no not in a whole lifetime of hands to hold or bottoms to wipe!!
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