Working in a Children's Hospital

Ever since I started my new job back in August, people have asked me how I deal working with sick kids all the time. To tell you the truth, I never thought I’d be here. I never pictured myself in scrubs, driving to Charlotte at 5:30 in the morning to take care of sick kids from the ages of 1 day to 18 years. I never thought I could handle this either. Growing up I pictured myself as a teacher, or a coach of some sort. I began college declaring my major in Sports Management, thinking that I wanted to manage a professional football team. I had always dabbled in art, so one summer I even thought I wanted to study Interior Design and start my own company. This whole shenanigan with working in a hospital literally fell into my path and I never saw it coming.

The first time I even thought about “nursing” was when my grandmother was dying and I watched her day in and day out in the hospice house in Monroe, NC. I watched this powerful woman that I looked up to in so many ways go from living in a house by herself to not even being able to get out of bed. The highlight of her day was watching the birds eat at the rusted bird feeder out of her window. It was then, that I realized “nursing” is where I was supposed to be. I was sitting at my grandmother’s bedside, just her, me and the nurse. The nurse was helping my grandmother move in bed and get back and forth to the bathroom. I could tell that this woman was ready to head home but had taken a few minutes to help my grandmother with the tasks that she could no longer perform. She carried my grandmother with such passion and love and I could see it in her eyes that she genuinely cared about her and about the fact that her granddaughter was there visiting her dying grandmother. The fact that that nurse had cared for my grandmother, this lady she hardly knew in such a loving manner forced me to look into nursing.

Now, almost two years later I work at Levine Children’s Hospital on an amazing floor with amazing people for an amazing cause. Yes, it’s sad. It’s definitely not easy to walk into a room where parents are holding their little boy or girl just praying that the test comes back negative or that the procedure goes just as the doctor promised. It’s not easy seeing a baby lying by herself in her crib because her parents are forced to continue to work to pay the bills. But I do it for my grandmother and for that nurse that doesn’t even know the impact she made on me. I get up when it’s still dark out and I work hard until it’s dark again because even without knowing these kids, I care for them and even if it’s the smallest gesture, I want to make a difference. I want to make a parent feel safe and secure in the doctor’s orders; I want to make a child laugh when their away from home and their toys and I want to wear my badge proud because I love what I do and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else ever again.