My College Drama

Wow! Has my life Changed since High School. Where do I even begin? Well let's see. I started going to AUM the fall after graduation. Nursing was my major. I was sooooo excited. For as long as I could remember I wanted to be in the medical field and I had finally narrowed down exactly where. I was going to be a nurse. I was going to help people. Well my first two years there were great. They were just my basic classes. You know Biology, Chemisty, Anatomy, all the stuff that you could learn in books. This time was a little hectic because I was planning my wedding to my High School Sweetheart, Daniel. Most of you reading this will remember him because I was with him all but one year of high school. We were married on May 15th 2004. (I'll write about that wonderful experience later). Well it came time to start my actual nursing school and I couldnt be happier when I received my letter in the mail that I had been excepted. This was such and honor you see because not everyone that had completed those first two years was excepted. So off to the bookstore I went to buy all the things I would need. Who would have thought it would have been so much. I needed a fork lift just to get back to my car. That night I was so excited that I opened everything and looked through every single book. By the end of the night I was so overwhelmed at all the material that I thought to myself " Shawna, are you really up for all of this?" I decided that I was and went on to bed. The first day of nursing school approached rapidly. I was very excited and nervous all at the same time. So after the first week of classes I was even more overwhelmed than I was before. The vast amount of material that had to been learned so rapidly was crazy. And this was way more serious than my underlevel classes. I couldnt just learn this stuff for the test and then forget most of it. I had to retain each and every single thing that I learned. I loved Labs however. That is when I got to do all the cool stuff like learn how to put an I.V. in or learn how to insert a Catheter. All the things you think of when you think of nursing. So to make a long story short I got through the first semester. It was tough but I was okay! And thus the dreaded second semester started. This was the semester that was known as the horrible semester and everyone knew that if you could make it through that semester that you could make it through the rest with a breeze. Who would have thought that the material you had to learn was double the amount of last semester? And that wasnt even the rough part. My much beloved labs turned into a nerve racking fiasco. This semester we started to work in the hospitals with real people. It was no longer the funny looking dummies in the fake hospital beds at the school. This was real live people with real live blood running through their vains. So the school labs turned into a place where you test your skills in front of nursing professors and one tiny little misshap got you lots more practice time in the pretend hospital and a big fat F for that week. If you passed you were sent off to the hospitals to take care of these live patients.

This where I started to crack. My first patient was one of the worst cases I could have ever had to start out with. This person had so many different problems that I wont go into detail about but it was the first time I actually realized that THIS PERSON'S LIFE IS IN MY HANDS!!! One little mistake made by me could cost them their life.Could I really do this? The pressure was unbeleivable. Why had I never thought about this before? Why was this happening to me now, after three years of nursing school? Well I pushed through and made myself keep going. There was no way I could quit now. So after many days at the hospital I realized something. This had caused me to change. I had shut myself off from my emotions in order to get through the day. I had hardened my heart in order to be able to treat a patient without falling apart and crying because of their situation. During the middle of all of this My Uncle died from cancer and I could not cry. I had trained myself to not cry. This was not the person I wanted to be. I wanted to be a nurse to help people not to stop caring. By this time I was a complete mess trying to figure out what I wanted to do. My husband saw how much I was tormented and he was soooo supportive. So needless to say after that semester ended I decided that Nursing was no longer the career path for me. So I changed my major to business, which is the complete opposite of nursing. I knew that really wasnt what I wanted to do but I needed a complete change. So I stuck with it for a few semesters.

I currently am not going to school. I keep thinking about going back and I will eventually I just want to be completely sure about what I want to do with my life. I cant afford to waste anymore time and money on classes that aren't really what I want. I am still young and have plenty of time to decide. I don't want to be one of those people who go to work everyday and hate what they do. TO BE CONTINUED.