Nurses are a special breed of student. While other majors spend class time texting on their cell phones, nursing students entrance themselves in the study of the right techniques in finding pulse, taking respiration rates, and finding the always difficult measured blood pressure. As families gets together on holidays, talk of football scores and recent politics are put on the back burner while the nursing student educates parents and siblings on proper exercise and eating habits. When other students cringe over less-than-appropriate dinner table conversation, the nursing student finds satisfaction over the understanding of the antagonistic relationship between allergy medications and benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH).
These situations put forth, it is not difficult to see why nursing students isolate themselves from other majors in order to adhere to their fellow nursing students. Few accounting majors are anxious to hear about the successes of a student nurse in giving her first bed bath or administering her first rectal suppository. Likewise, those squeamishly inclined tend to shy away from conversations regarding the packing of a tunneled wound or treatment of a newly discovered parasite.
To a nursing student, illness and its corresponding ailments are much like the car wreck passerby phenomenon. While clinical may introduce sights and sounds that disgust the nursing student as much as any other person, there is an inherent need to see more. With craning necks and little thought to the aftermath of such an action, a nursing student will do anything to catch the slightest glimpse at the gaping gunshot wound in room 4. Like traffic passing a car accident, something within itches to see what is going on and what is being done to fix it.
I blame my own nursing “itch” on skinned knees. If knee, elbow, and wrist pads had been used on bicycle riders when I was a child, there is a large possibility I would not be studying nursing. My skinned knees, as painful and bloody as they often presented, were the most fascinating wounds. Watching the blood clot and seeing the layers of skin from a birds-eye view… no anatomy or physiology book could inspire such a passion. In the later days of a skinned knee, there was further enthrallment in the scab forming and disappearing before one’s eyes. The scars on my knees today are proof of my early research and experimentation (aka scab picking).
Now, as I lose myself for hours in my pharmacology textbook rather than my skinned knees, the passion of my younger years is ever-present. Only a fellow nurse can understand the thrill of seeing oneself in a pair of scrubs for the first time or the exhilaration of hitting the blood vessel at just the right angle so the blood comes pouring into the test vile. There is no feeling to match the satisfaction a nursing student experiences as a coding patient pulls through the nosedive and their vitals stabilize. While the cry of an infant during a spinal tap eats at a nurse’s compassion, seeing that same infant released healthy after antibiotic treatment erases all the pain. There is no equivalent sensation to the one a nursing student feels when his/her actions improve the life of a patient. One time of seeing a patient smile at you and there is no turning back. You are a nurse for life.
These situations put forth, it is not difficult to see why nursing students isolate themselves from other majors in order to adhere to their fellow nursing students. Few accounting majors are anxious to hear about the successes of a student nurse in giving her first bed bath or administering her first rectal suppository. Likewise, those squeamishly inclined tend to shy away from conversations regarding the packing of a tunneled wound or treatment of a newly discovered parasite.
To a nursing student, illness and its corresponding ailments are much like the car wreck passerby phenomenon. While clinical may introduce sights and sounds that disgust the nursing student as much as any other person, there is an inherent need to see more. With craning necks and little thought to the aftermath of such an action, a nursing student will do anything to catch the slightest glimpse at the gaping gunshot wound in room 4. Like traffic passing a car accident, something within itches to see what is going on and what is being done to fix it.
I blame my own nursing “itch” on skinned knees. If knee, elbow, and wrist pads had been used on bicycle riders when I was a child, there is a large possibility I would not be studying nursing. My skinned knees, as painful and bloody as they often presented, were the most fascinating wounds. Watching the blood clot and seeing the layers of skin from a birds-eye view… no anatomy or physiology book could inspire such a passion. In the later days of a skinned knee, there was further enthrallment in the scab forming and disappearing before one’s eyes. The scars on my knees today are proof of my early research and experimentation (aka scab picking).
Now, as I lose myself for hours in my pharmacology textbook rather than my skinned knees, the passion of my younger years is ever-present. Only a fellow nurse can understand the thrill of seeing oneself in a pair of scrubs for the first time or the exhilaration of hitting the blood vessel at just the right angle so the blood comes pouring into the test vile. There is no feeling to match the satisfaction a nursing student experiences as a coding patient pulls through the nosedive and their vitals stabilize. While the cry of an infant during a spinal tap eats at a nurse’s compassion, seeing that same infant released healthy after antibiotic treatment erases all the pain. There is no equivalent sensation to the one a nursing student feels when his/her actions improve the life of a patient. One time of seeing a patient smile at you and there is no turning back. You are a nurse for life.
