As you all know, I’m working on getting my nursing degree, with the thought that I’d probably like to work in the NICU, labor and delivery, or mother and baby care.
However!
I want to stay open about what type of nursing I will do. I know that it can be hard to find openings in labor and delivery, especially as a new nurse, so I will need to be flexible.
Plus, I know that as I go through nursing school, I’ll do rotations in various specialties, and I know it’s possible that I will end up loving something I thought I’d hate and vice-versa.
I’m pretty sure there are some types of nursing that I will absolutely not feel called to do (geriatrics and psych come to mind), but hey, I could be wrong.
And I think I’d enjoy mother/baby nursing, but I could be wrong about that too!
So, God bless the fact that nursing school will involve clinical rotations.
Hi Kristen, I came to nursing from a background in ambulance work, so I thought I was heading for trauma nursing. Surprise! I hated casualty/ER! I ended up (happily) in maternity. A friend who started out in maternity is now a very accomplished primary care nurse, and a colleague whose main interest (up until 4th year) was occupational health and safety nursing, now has a doctorate in psychiatric and mental health nursing. Always stay open… nursing has almost endless possibilities for you!
Yes, so often in life we don’t know what we love/hate until we try it!
I definitely agree with being open in our careers. I became a nurse because I wanted to work in L&D. Had to so my time in med-surg first, which was very helpful when new. Then had a great twelve years inNursery and OB. Now it gets interesting: home health care, hospice, nursing home, back to OB (which by then was just operating machines), addictions treatment center, county jail, detox, caring for special needs/medically-fragile babies and toddlers at home, outpatient psych, detox, and now I’m a flex nurse, owning a construction company!
Imperfection is what I’d like to be open to. I’m a perfectionist in most things, and I wish I wasn’t. I use the Flylady cleaning routine, and my biggest challenge with it still is understanding that I don’t have to do all of it – and completely – every time. I’m slowly learning to tell myself to stop, everything on the list doesn’t have to get done every single time. It’s not just cleaning that I am a perfectionist about, but cleaning is an area of my biggest struggles.
JD, it sounds like you and I are soul sisters both with the struggles in the category of cleaning but also just being perfect and trying to check off the whole list in any given category. It’s exhausting, isn’t it? I really identified with your answer!
I want to be more open and grow in the spiritual understanding that countries are just artificial, man-made lines between people, and understanding that we are all much more alike than different; no one is better or worse, things like that.