This is it. This is what I have been waiting and preparing for during the past five years. This is the day I've dreamed of since I was a small child. This is what I know I have been called to do and am finally going to do.
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Today is my first day of nursing school. God willing, 16 months from now I will be an RN, and in two sure-to-be-short-despite-feeling-endless-now years, I will be a clinical nurse leader.
What the heck am I thinking???
I can't do this! I can't! I'm almost forty, for goodness' sake! I have two little kids, a husband, a messy house, and a clingy dog. How am I supposed to pull this off???
OK, OK, calm down. I am not the oldest in my class (though far, far from the youngest). The kids are in school; they already think I lie around doing nothing all day while they're gone, so maybe they won't notice that the house is even messier than usual. My husband is supportive so far, though I'm already getting nervous about the laundry being gray and how we'll ever have five minutes to talk. And the dog... well, the dog is going to have to adjust.
School. Full-time. I love school. I'm good at school; I know I can do the school part. The professors are dynamic, my colleagues are brilliant, interesting people, and the program teaches exactly what I want to learn.
But nursing. Can I do it? Can I walk into a room and stick a needle in someone I've never met? Can I react quickly enough to be of help instead of just being in the way? Can I look someone in the eye and honestly tell him I'm going to be taking care of him? ME?
Sure, lots of people are nurses. Millions, actually. They all survived nursing school and doing the work and sticking needles into strangers. They all had to walk into that room for the first time, look that patient in the eye, and mean it when they said they could help.
But some of them aren't very good! And others are just mediocre, marking time until they can retire or move on to another department. I don't want to be a mediocre nurse. I really don't want to be a lousy nurse. The ones who don't know how to place an IV and don't have the guts to ask for help. The ones who sashay into the room of a woman in hard labor who has been begging for an epidural, and proclaim it "more natural this way". The ones who don't like what they do, who have lost the vision and joy of what they do. The ones that just don't care anymore.
I want to care! I want to be a perfect nurse, and that is impossible. I want to enjoy every minute of it, and that is also impossible. Are my expectations too high? Is that why I'm so terrified?
Or am I just standing on the edge, scared to step off because right now, from where I'm standing, I can't see that it's not an edge but the border of a whole new land?
