This was written for a my English 300 class at PA College of Health Science Fall 2016.
As a male nurse, I’ve often been asked why I decided to become a nurse. I suppose that’s because for some, the career choice may not be so obvious for a guy. To be honest, I don’t always know why I became a nurse–and probably there was not one primary reason–but perhaps more a culmination of experiences that gave me the impetus. I often think of four events that helped me push me towards to become an RN.
About the year I turned 12, my father quit his job at the family business to start his own family business so he could spend more time with his growing gaggle of energetic boys. Our farm was the shape of an arrowhead, cut by two merging highways, where as much traffic as you could expect in rural Kansas flowed by. So Dad started a market garden and I got to pull weeds. Our garden produced an abundance that year. But you need to sell a lot of tomatoes to feed a growing family.
One day, Dad walked into the house as Mom was setting a pot of steaming rice and beans on the table. His weather-beaten skin glistened with sweat as he reached in the little cubby where he kept his paperwork. “I guess I’d better put a little gas in the truck,” he told Mom. But there was no cash to be found. Instead, he handed me the old pineapple can, half full of loose change. I dumped it out with a crash on the table and started counting coins with him. After the can was about half empty, Dad said, “That ought to do till pay day.“ And so Dad put several dollars of gas in the truck.
The problem with that was this kept happening all summer. Dad was a brave and visionary man. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was events like this that helped me realize I didn’t want to live my life hand-to-mouth like Dad was willing to, even if it meant working for someone else.
About five years later, I was now working on a construction crew, pouring solid new concrete walls beneath existing houses. One beautiful spring day in early June the rising sun was painting the clouds in the eastern sky with fire as I and my three compatriots leapt out of the old Ford at the jobsite. The first section of crumbling foundation had already been excavated and the footer poured. Today, we would try to form up and pour the accompanying wall before digging out the rest of the old basement. Within moments of arrival, our light jackets had already been shed and jovial shouts were echoing across the site as the battered old forms were screwed into place. By lunchtime, the forming was looking good and the concrete had been ordered.
But shortly after lunch, the brilliant azure sky began to turn deep blue, and then from deep blue to gray. Leaves were whipping across the yard and a chill crept into the air as the sun was swallowed in the billowing gray mass. “You about got that buttoned up out there, Mark?” shouted the foreman as he peered through the window opening, “It’s going to rain!” Packing up was out of the question as a downpour would most likely cause a cave-in of the narrow trench and destroy the empty walls. Shoveling muddy clay out of an eight-foot trench was a 12 out of 10 on my pain scale, so I desperately labored to wrap up the last section of wall.
The sky erupted in brilliant white as the concrete truck rumbled up the drive. “Looks like a dandy!” shouted the driver as he revved the engine to mix in the extra water to thin the concrete. Thunder crashed overhead as I shivered on the scaffolding. I knew I couldn’t put on my jacket or I would have nothing dry to wear on the ride home. Great droplets started sporadically at first, but rapidly progressed to a regular downpour. This side of the house had no gutters, so great sheets of rain crashed upon my huddled back. The wind whipped the droplets into my chattering teeth. From out in the monsoon, the rate of the concrete filling the wall seemed unbearably leisurely, but the walls were all full and tapped out eventually.
I think my boss bought us Pizza Hut for our pains. It sure was nice of him, but I guess I’m just not that cracked on working in the “beautiful” great outdoors.
And then, there’s that time a few years later when my family moved to a new area of Kansas. Over coffee one day, Sonny, our new neighbor, reported that Oswego, our nearby town of 3,000, used to be almost too full on Saturday evening to walk down Main Street on. “Nowadays,” he gestured emphatically with his massive weather-beaten hands, “You can shoot a cannonball down Main Street and not hit a thing!” And it’s true—Labette county, like so many other western countries, are ebbing away. The survivors are frugal and cautious–and they have to be in order to stay behind. And so it was no surprise that Dad and I had almost no work for a whole year. You know, it’s hard to live the American dream when you can’t get a job. I knew I was going to need to get out of self-employed construction and manual labor if I wanted break this cycle of dependence on weather and entry-level jobs.
Labette county has a pretty good little community college with a real solid nursing program. I was willing to give it a try. But first, I needed to know I could put my heart into something that involved bedpans and barf. Nurse aides make about what I was making in my current construction job, so I enrolled in a CNA class, which was held at a local nursing home. The first evening, as I approached the ornately carved massive outer door and was greeted with a keypad required to let myself in, I remembered thinking, “What on earth am I doing here?!” But I bravely crossed the threshold. There, the pungent smell of disinfectant struck my nostrils. There is only one place in the world that has the smell of sterile pee—a nursing home.
“Come on, Mark,” my instructor said, “let’s get this done.” I was no stranger to working in mud and being dirty, but helping a little old grandma off the commode was certainly not in the same class. At the moment, I was sure it was an entirely different galaxy. Gingerly, I snapped on the blue nitrile gloves. “Are these things really waterproof?” I wondered in horror. But it was too late to back out now, because Grandma’s hazy gray eyes were peering trustingly at me through her smudged glasses. “Just do your thing,” they seemed to say.” She grunted to stand with my instructor and I’s assistance. With her contractured legs, she had trouble standing upright. Hygiene completed, she sat down heavily into the wheelchair which had been crammed in at the only angle it would fit in the microscopic bathroom. “Thank you”, she whispered. What was so awkward for me was simply her expectation, and really, her need. In this moment, I realized I could actually be a nurse. She needed me.
A week later during clinicals, an LPN on duty approached me unexpectedly as she whipped up the standard second dinner of crushed pills in applesauce for some wheelchair-bound denizen. “You’re going to be a really good nurse, Mark,” she said. I was surprised and taken back at these prophetic words from someone who had barely seen me do something I didn’t even know myself if I could do. Those gracious words were over 10 years ago; I have often thought of them as being an integral part of the motivation for me to go through with the 5-hour nights of sleep, hours of study, and living paycheck to paycheck as I fought my way through nursing school.
And so for me, my reasons to be a nurse were both from pragmatism and purpose. I was done with being subject to the whims of the weather (I didn’t even mention the color of your toes when you drive a skid loader all day in January). I simply wanted to make a decent wage in an area where it was hard to get a job; I wanted to be the loving provider for my future family. CNA class showed me I loved the thrill of showing gentle love to the person who could not reciprocate. Sometimes it seems strangely coincidental that I ever even considered going to nursing school. And yet I know that for the God to whom I entrust my life there are no coincidences.
