Going to nursing school in middle age with history of depression and fibromyalgia

[ShouldIBeNurse]

I'm trying to find some sort of job where I a) get to use mostly logical/scientific/non-subjective skills b) get to interact with human beings a good bit of the time, not always in a combative way and c) feel like I'm making a positive contribution to the world.

I went into engineering type work out of undergrad because it made good money and looked to be a growth field and worked there for over a decade, while debating if it was the right work for me.

A career test said I was too extroverted for engineering and suggested several health care fields, including nursing, plus stuff like teaching. At the time I thought I could never handle nursing because I couldn't tolerate blood, and I'd avoided biology since high school for similar reasons. I've since found I'm much more tolerant of blood than I used to be. Like helping my dad take his blood sugar during a hypoglycemic episode, or watching someone draw blood from me.

I picked another health care field based on it made good money and was a growth field. But I found that the health care field was based a lot on philosophy and psychology, and I strongly disagreed with some of the philosophical underpinnings. So I quit partway through, after being hospitalized for depression.

I then tried to go to school to refresh my engineering skills, but I've found I dread the prospects of going back to a desk job sitting at a computer all day.

I've had more bouts with depression, and have found that whenever I am on medication that seems to work effectively for the depression, I am very prone to insomnia and shift my sleep schedule so I'm up most of the night and sleep into the afternoon. So that gets rid of another objection to nursing - that they frequently work nights.

Before I got into school for the other health care field, I'd considered nursing if I hadn't gotten in, but I only know about nursing schools in the area where I used to live. Most of those had wanted microbiology and chemistry for their BSN programs, which I hadn't had.

I'm now trying to figure out if I should look into an ADN program in the state I live in now. I know both nursing school and nursing work can be very stressful. I don't know if I should do an LPN program first, work a couple years, and then do ADN or BSN? I figure that I only have 20 years left to work, so getting a BSN might not be worth it.

My depression appears to flare up whenever I'm under a lot of stress. I was a really good student in high school - got into a school ranked in the top 20 in the country. My grades in college varied. The engineering classes I took didn't get the best grades. My community college prerequisites for the other health care program were pretty good, mostly A's. I do much better when I have paper textbooks and can mostly work away from the computer. Oh, I forgot to mention, I've also got ADHD. And I don't know if the concussion I got in a car accident a couple years ago had impacted my ability to study.

One of the reasons I'm thinking about nursing, is that I'm interested in psychiatric nursing. However, at this point I've got psychiatric records at three of the major hospital systems in the area. I know that HIPAA and tracking of who reads medical records is supposed to block people looking at them. But one of the messages earlier said not to mention mental health history to your coworkers, or your nursing school.

What about mentioning my fibromyalgia to prospective schools? It looks like most nursing schools have a lockstep program, where everybody has to take the same classes. That was part of the problem I had in the previous health care program. I tried to take a reduced load and it didn't work out. But I'm off the anti-depressant that made me need much more sleep than other people.