yes, contrary to popular belief, nursing and medicine are two different animals. medicine is often times one tracked, rushed, and based on drugs, cutting, burning, and other such painful remedies. a doctor spends all of fifteen minutes with a patient during their stay at a hospital and who ends up implementing a good 95% of it? you guessed it! nurses. to think, a long, long LONG time ago i wanted to be a doctor. i was sadly mistaken.
to make a long story short, i felt a call to medical missions at thirteen. my first job was as a nursing care assistant at sixteen (yeah i totally missed the point and spent all my focus on the docs). it has taken one botched freshman year in college, one associates (soon to be two), a useless B.S. in Biology (b.s.... about all you can do with that degree), a CNA course, and three missions trips to figure out that medical missions isn't just for doctors, and nursing is more a field that describes what i want to do. nurses don't just say " rm 309 has pneumonia and needs 325 mg of augmentin three times a day," they say "mr. fields has trouble breathing and is in a lot of pain due to some other conditions, he also just lost his wife so we might want to take that into consideration." if we see a homeless man that is hungry, we don't just treat his illness and give him a prescription for drugs he can't afford, we feed him, we get him fresh clothes if he needs them, find a shelter for him, get him a program that can pay for his meds and follow up on him. that is what true nursing is all about. sure there are some that are only in it for the money, but at its core, that is what it is about.
don't get me wrong, doctors are important. they do the surgeries, help with research, they are the walking PDA's (physician's desk reference), they focus on the diseases and treatments so we can focus on everything else about patient care. its just not for me. i've never been this excited about my future. i had no idea that nursing was so versatile. furthermore, nurses can go on to be nurse practitioners and have their own specialized practice, without the help of a doctor! God has opened up a whole new world to me and i can hardly contain myself. its been a long journey, but its good to be on track. seven years is a long time. huh... that's interesting... isn't seven the number of completion?
so i hope to go on to get an MHA (masters in health admin.) and my MNP (masters in nurse practitioner) without having to get a BRN (bachelors in registered nursing) and it looks like in about three years and 75% less money i can do the same thing a family doctor does and then some because with an MHA i can open and run my own hospital ( a little ambitious i know). looks like Medicrates (C) is on its way to reality! did i mention that Jesus rocks my socks!?!?!
