What inspired you to become a nurse?

zahryia, LPN · Feb 14, 2010

It wasn't any one reason in itself, but a bunch of smaller reasons:

I got sick and had an idiot Park Ave doctor that treated me like crap. I had to advocate for myself and it got me wondering what the average patient has to go through to get some respect and input regarding their own body. I wanted to become an advocate.

I was already in the healtcare field (public health and quality improvement) and thought an RN would make me more marketable.

Within my public health career, I have always had a strong interest in maternal and child health and decided if I was to become a nurse, the only type of nurse I would become is a maternity nurse. I absolutely had no desire to work with sick people. I wanted to be in a position to promote health and prevent disease.

Because my stint as an OB has been somewhat disappointing in the sense that the maternity unit is extremely medicalized, I now want to be an NP and be in a position to do real health promotion and disease prevention.

But those are my reasons in a nutshell.

NurseNinaFla · Feb 14, 2010

Prevention is the best form of treatment!

Thanks for sharing!

TwilightRNurse · Feb 14, 2010

Always liked the nurses on TV shows. Once I got into school I loved it more than I could ever have imagined.

Argo · Feb 14, 2010

I have worked in surgery since about 21 and in hospitals since 19. One year that it was very slow, one of the bad lulls, I noticed that everyone but the RNs were on the hitlist for layoffs. Everyone else went first then they went for the RNs. The day that the biggest round of layoffs happened I went to the local school and enrolled to get my last round of prerequisites done. I was 26 at the time and had my license by 30. I knew I liked working in the OR all along since I had been there so long, my niche found me.... Within 3 months of being licensed I was in charge of the dept.....my background in scrubbing and purchasing helped ALOT and made me better than any other nurse that was there at the time. Since I have been in nursing and prior, in the OR I met very few nurses that really cared about what they were doing.... I wanted to try and change that so I trained my own staff. I recruited from the floors with nurses that wanted to do OR nursing and had excellent reputations, I hated the fact that no one would give people an IN to the OR.... I made a training regiment that they would follow me through the OR for 3 months and I would show them everything that they needed to know in every service that we did. I now have an excellent staff of very good nurses that care and can do everything from eyes to AAA.... They all mop floors and transport pts without being asked and spend very little time in the lounge/locker rooms.....

I will say that I was very lucky with my prior boss that is no longer at my hospital. While transitioning from purchasing manager to OR nursing I trained a replacement in the purchasing and had about 9 months that I was able to crosstrain in the OR, really just be a free hand getting paid by another dept... I worked with 2-3 very good nurses that unfortunately went on to greener fields before I got out of school because of the Board runner at the time......

bnb0627 · Feb 14, 2010

I was 13 weeks pregnant (my 1st) and docs couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. Vomitting, fever up 103, could not keep food down. I was scared, it was night and my husband was home to sleep since he had work and he was the only one supporting us. I called the night nurse in because my fever was going up again and I was getting meds every 3 hours to keep it down. She said it was only 99. something and we should wait. Came back half an hour later and it was 103. She ran out of the room which made me more scared. Came back with meds. Never said anything polite or comforting. It took 2 more hours for my fever to go down. The next day I was put on the peds floor cause they didn't know where to put me and I had the most wonderful nurse ever. A nice smile and a couple kind words can really change the way you feel, even if it's only for a few minutes. Also, when I was in the hospital a couple times with my kids 101 fever with a 6week old, staples in the head for 2year old, and stitches in the lip 3 year old, the nurses all remarked on how calm I was and said I should get into nursing.

Nepenthe Sea · Feb 14, 2010

I have always had a major medical curiosity, but never wanted to be a nurse or a doctor. My grandpa was a medical lab tech, I took his tapeworm specimen to show-and-tell at school in the first grade (yeah, I was that kid!). As I grew up, I became more artistically inclined. I loved to look at the pictures in my mom's old nursing books from when she went to school, but I just never felt like I could clean up poop and puke. i was too 'artisitc and sensitive' for that! :lol2:

Fast forward to New Year's Day, 2006. I am 31 weeks pregnant with twins, and a four-hour drive from home, visiting family. My water broke out of nowhere, and I went to the hospital. My children were born and immediately whisked off to a Level III neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). They spent five weeks there, and I spent several days in the hospital myself, recovering from a c-section I had with the second baby. My nurses were GREAT! I loved talking to them. The nurses in the NICU were awesome, too. They were encouraging, and helped me out when they could. They took excellent care of my daughters, and I really just enjoyed talking to them, as well. I spent all my time in the NICU, helping to take care of my babies. The nurses showed me all kinds of stuff, and explained everything to me. I guess it was kind of like shadowing a nurse for five weeks.

Previous to this experience, I had always thought that hospitals were scary places where bad things happen. I knew people often get better, and babies are born there, but I was intimidated by the smells, and especially all the scary, torturous-looking equipment. Being in the hospital for five weeks, I got to know what most of that equipment was, and it wasn't so scary after all. I was also very interested in everything that was going on with my girls, in regard to their treatments, meds, etc. I found that preemies are VERY interesting - they are completely different from other babies.

Of course, I hated that my kids were in NICU, and couldn't wait to get out. But once we got out, I found that I kept thinking about it. I started watching "Babies: Special Delivery" on t.v., which is about NICU babies, and realized one day that I thought it might be really cool to work in one. I knew that meant becoming a nurse, though, which I wasn't so sure about. I remembered how one of the NICU nurses watched me doing something with one of my babies, and she said, "You know, you're good at this. You should think about going to school for this." I just laughed it off at the time, but I eventually started thinking that I might like it.

When my kids were 18 months old, their dad and I separated. I moved back to the town where they had been born and moved in with my mom. I realized that I was going to have to go back to school in order to support myself and my kids, and decided nursing is what I wanted to do. I am in my third semester of a five-semester program, and am going to try to get a student tech job this summer, hopefully in the NICU in which my girls stayed.

mustlovepoodles, RN · Feb 14, 2010

Money and job security :cool:

dudette10, MSN, RN · Feb 14, 2010

I know that being a patient or being a family member of a patient doesn't necessarily equate to being a good nurse, but it doesn't hurt either. Having been in hospitals, mostly as a POA family member all across the lifespan (parent, spouse, POA on another family member), I see LOTS of nurses and doctors, and I see the "good" ones and the "bad" ones. I'm smart, I can read people, and I've been inspired and appalled.

As for the good nurses, I wanted to be one of them. I'm 39, I have worked in a multitude of working environments, and I see no other profession that can directly make a difference in someone's life. Having worked in a Fortune 500 company, the only difference I made was in lining the CEO's wallet.

I felt bad for the PT who couldn't get my kid to participate in therapy, but I saw the reasons why. I was angry at the nurse who treated my husband as an irritant because he blew his chest tube while straining on the toilet. (plus, she just shoved the thing back in...he was high on morphine so no pain there, at least!) I was impressed with the nurse who recognized that my 5-year old TBI child was in pain, even though I didn't know it because he couldn't speak or make identifiably purposeful movements. I nearly cried when an ICU nurse encouraged and helped me hold my 2-year old when I had been staring longlingly at his teary face through the jail bars of his crib...I was afraid to pick him up because of all the tubes! I felt alternately sorry for and irritated with the nurse who didn't know of any way to handle my MIL--disoriented and wandering--when she was hospitalized. I realized the magic of complementary and alternative therapies when my TBI child would only calm down in his agitation phase with the harp-playing musical therapist, and I'm grateful to the nurse who called her to help. I was touched when my 2-year old clung on to the knees of his nurse at discharge because he learned to love her in only two short days. I saw the tears of surprise in the eyes of the nurse who was helping transfer my 5-year old to a commode, when my kid misinterpreted the proper transfer technique for just a friendly hug from the nurse. My big guy hugged him tightly and kissed him on the cheek.

I could go on.

fungez · Feb 15, 2010

I got pregnant by a loser when I was 21. I looked around for a job with flexible hours and job security (I had the optimistic thought I'd get married and I wanted to home to raise my kids). At the time I could get an RN in 2 years so that's what I did. It was purely practical. I had no desire prior to this to be a nurse but I go to work and do the best job I can.

Boy how things have changed. Now shifts are primarily 12 hours which don't work well for young kids, as do the every other weekends. I do have to say after so many years I'm finally making decent money (started at 12 bucks an hour in 1991). Things have gotten worse over the years. There's a lack of respect from both the community and administration that wasn't there when I started. Back when you were short-staffed it was understood that not everything would get done. Now, having 6 patients is no excuse to fill out rounding sheets, do all the QA's, and whatever else admin. has thought up. Every time I see a student nurse I ask them it it's too late to change their major. They always laugh. I don't know why.

SuesquatchRN, BSN, RN · Feb 15, 2010

I can't say that I was really inspired. My job was computerized so I became a programmer and then that job got sent overseas after the Y2K conversion. I had a lot of biology credits and liked it and figured that you can't outsource old, sick people. Applied to nursing school and got in.

ItsTheDude · Feb 15, 2010

reasons (inspiration), in no particular order:

it's an easy job

work with the public

pay is above average

work with lots of women

job knowledge helps with my health and the health of my family

get to help people

climate controlled work enviroment

basically wear pj's to work (scrubs)

better than average job security

better than average employment opportunities

low level of education needed, considering all the above

and the list goes on...