The Secret Club: My Love Letter to Nursing School

Today was my last official day of school.  I typed that sentence and immediately started crying.  I have no adequate words that could possibly describe what this experience has been for me.  The last time I tried to explain it I finally said "It's like what I imagine falling in love is like".

This has brought me more pain, stress, sleepless nights, heartbreak, and feelings of frustration that anything else.  But it has also brought me more joy, triumph, laughter, and peace than anything else.  I'm going to share a really long excerpt from a book on nursing I read once.  It is by far the closest thing I've ever found to describe what nursing actually is.
"Nursing is among the most important professions in the world. 
In no other profession do people float ably among specialties, helping to ease babies into being, escorting men and women gently into death, and heroically resurrecting patients in between.  There are few other careers in which people are so devoted to a noble purpose that they work twelve, fourteen, sixteen straight hours without eating, sleeping, or taking breaks and often without commensurate pay simply because they believe in the importance of their job.  They are frequently the first responders on the front lines of malady and contagion, risking their own health to improve someone else's.  Nursing is more than a career; it is a calling.  Nurses are remarkable.  Yet contemporary literature largely neglects them.
At 3.5 million strong in the United States and more than 20 million worldwide, nurses are the largest group of healthcare providers.  The women who compromise 90 percent of the workforce are a unique sisterhood whose bonds are forged through the most dramatic miracles and traumas as well as the tedious, routine tastas necessary to keep human bodies functioning.  Nursing, for brave men and women, is "like a secret club that holds immense emotional joy and fulfillment in spite of shared tragedies".  Nurses call the profession a secret club because their experiences are so novel, their jobs so intimate and occasionally horrifying, their combination of compassion and desensitization so peculiar, that they imagine nobody else could understand what it is like to work in their once-white shoes.  
Pop culture would have us believe that nurses play a small, trivial role in healthcare; medical television programs tend to show doctors lingering at patient's bedsides while nurses flit and intone "Yes, Doctor" in the background.  But this is not the case.  "We are not just bed-making, drink serving, poop wiping, medication passing assistants.  We are much more".
They are, for example, reporters.  They discuss and document patient status, serving as the main point of contact for doctors, surgeons, therapists, social workers, and other specialists.  They are watchmen, keeping vigil, meticulously monitoring vital signs, deciphering patients' individual trends and patterns, painstakingly double-checking dosages and medications.  They are detectives, investigating deviations, asking questions, listening carefully, searching for clues.  They are warriors, called to serve at the first sign of outbreak, fighting infection, containing disease.  They are gatekeepers, turning staff members away when patients need a break from procedures, a nap, or a moment to digest their circumstances.  They are scientists, constantly learning, tackling sociology, psychology, physiology, anatomy, pharmacology, chemistry, microbiology.  They are advocates, lobbying physicians for or against procedures, for pain assistance, for a few more minutes of time.  They are teachers, educating patients and parents: how to suction a tracheostomy, change an airway, inject medication, breastfeed a newborn.  They are the muscle, holding patients down to insert or remove tubes or needles, pushing people to get out of bed following surgery, breaking a sweat when performing CPR, lifting, moving, pushing, forcing, turning.  They are confidants, protectors, communicators, comforters, nurturers; easing fears, offering solace, cradling babies whose parents can't be there, consoling loved ones who feel that all hope is gone.  They are multitaskers: supporting, coordinating, and inhabiting all these roles at once.  And they are lionhearted diplomats, helping a patient die with dignity in one room, facilitating a recovery in the next, keeping their composure even when they are shaken to the core."
My heart is filled with so much love and pride at what I have accomplished and the profession I am joining.  Throughout my time I have laughed and joked about how terrible men are with a patient while also comforting a woman who just lost hers.  I have witnessed miracles, humans coming back from death, infants that shouldn't be alive who fight with everything they have.  I have held the hands of a woman experiencing a terrible miscarriage.
I have watched two beautiful baby boys go from tiny and struggling to leaving the hospital in the arms of their parents.

 I have placed tubes and IV's.  I have mixed and hung and passed medications.  I have had to be there when a doctor gives someone a terrible diagnosis.  I have celebrated when a very sick patient recovers and goes home.  I have seen people die.   I have seen people be born.  I have cried and laughed and ached and smiled.

Beyond just the experiences I have had....I have to briefly talk about the family I have created with the people I have experienced all of this with.  My own personal secret club.  The people I can text, "I don't know what I'm doing I am having a nervous breakdown" and they respond that they feel the same way.  The people who I have cried with and laughed so hard I've peed my pants with.  The people I can vent to about anything and they understand.  The people I can talk to about a difficult case or patient and they know exactly how to help me decompress.  I love these people.  These people have my whole heart for my whole life.  I will ache for them so much when I don't get to see them every week.

My instructors have been a constant source of understanding.  More than teaching us technical skills or nursing concepts, they have taught me how to love others.  They have taught me how to fight through hard things.  They have encouraged me and kept me sane.  I am so lucky.
There are too many thoughts and feelings but I just wanted to document what nursing and the last 3 years has meant to me.  When I decided to quit my salary job and go into debt for nursing school I had at least 700 breakdowns and I questioned my decision every day.  It was in the quiet moments of a terrible night while I was on my knees pleading for the Lord to help me understand that I heard a whisper "this is who you are, this is who you are meant to be, this is what I made you for".

The Lord made me to be a nurse.  He made me to advocate and love others fiercely.  He made me to save lives and prepare other lives to pass on to the next life.  I am a nurse.  This is who I was always meant to be...and I'm so glad I was.