As I sit here tonight, thinking about my new job and all the new things I will see and learn….I start looking back to the time before I was a nurse, before I’d had this training and this knowledge base. Going to nursing school, graduating with good grades, and doing it all while raising two kids and having a husband who’s health is sometimes a question mark.
I followed a home care nurse around the worst parts of the city and into roach-infested apartments. I stood for 8 hours in a freezing operating room, watching gallbladder after gallbladder come out.  I suctioned trachs, flushed IV lines, gave shots and pills, fluffed and turned. I changed elderly adults soiled briefs, cared for people with ORSA, MRSA, VRE, scabies, lice and C-diff.  I did psych where the patients scared the hell out of me. In maternity I saw babies born. This was all stuff that I never dreamed I would be doing.
And I learned. Like a sponge, you learn to soak it all up. Don’t miss anything and write it all down. You never know what will show up on the next test. And then the final exam of the final semester comes almost before you know it. Dread and trepidation keep you up at night, along with the thought that if you don’t know it by now you never will. That final time you close your textbook and put away your notebook…you sigh and leave home for the final exam.

They were still giving out the grades immediately when I took my final. That was the last time they did it. I was the first or second person done with the test. I looked around the room, not believing that I was actually done. I didn’t check my answers. You learn by the middle of the first semester to go with your gut, and take your first answer. It’s always the right one. It was a 100 question test. When I finished I took my test up. I passed! I was done. 
I. Finished. Nursing. School.

I hugged the instructors and danced out. Apparently someone after me did not pass, and either fainted or freaked out (depending on who is telling the story) and now no one gets their grades in the test room. Now they all have to wait 24 hours until the grades are posted.

Pinning came a week later, and the ceremony was great. There was a slide show, and awards. We were each pinned by a member of the faculty, and then we took a class picture. 77 of the original 99. Not too bad.
 
And then there was a huge moment of nothing….I had this sinking, lost feeling. School was over. I’d graduated.  And I had nothing to do for two weeks until my new job started.

I felt lost while. I don’t know why. I had a couple weeks of just being ahead of me. No studying, no getting up at the crack of dawn for clinical, no tests. It was odd. I slept a lot. Probably a minor depression. On one hand I was glad for the rest, on another, well, I wanted a party or something. 

So I bought new wall-to-wall carpeting.

The calling. It’s like waking up in the morning and it’s a really nice sunny day. You know you need to study, or do your laundry or something else…but… you just HAVE to go outside. When you have a cast on and it itches, you’ll do anything to scratch that itch. It’s like that.I won’t lie to you, sometimes it’s hard. Sure it is. You have to do stuff that’s really gross, or you have to hold it in when you want to puke. You have to find the words to make people feel at ease and safe. There are easy moments that are good. Maybe not so much the adrenaline rush that comes with the hard stuff, but it’s what helps you to keep coming back each day, knowing that sometimes it might not be so hard. The good times, the special moments. That’s what makes it easy to get up each morning and go back. You just never know when you’ll get a diamond in a pile of dust. You never know when the magic is going to start, that connection or whatever it is. Something…a look, a feeling, or just a hand on someone’s shoulder. When you experience that, when those magical moments happen, you just know it…that’s the pull. It’s that itch you have to scratch, that sunny day you have to experience. The calling to be a nurse.