Free Essay About My Life Experiences That Led Me Towards The Nursing Profession

The time that set my heart to the career of nursing was also the hardest and most intense in my life. It was the time that I had lost my mother to cancer. Her fight with the disease was a very brief one through no fault of her own. As hard as the time was for me and the rest of my family, the events that took place at the time were what inspired me to become a nurse, and I am eternally grateful for the good that came out of that dark and perilous time.
It had been a very long time since my mother had been suffering. I saw her coughing terribly, wishing so bad that I could help her in some way. I saw her turn dark from the pains that rose in her chest because of a condition that we were not yet even aware of. There was paint but with that, the family was also suffering from intense confusion for we had contacted so many specialists. We had been ordered through series of tests for respiratory problems to problems of the liver. To explain it in the shortest way possible, there was hardly any ailment that we had not crossed off through our repeated visits to the doctors and the various laboratories across the city. All the efforts were completely appearing futile to us for they were taking us nowhere and as mother’s condition worsened, the efforts became even more desperate and exhausting.
Finally, a general physician diagnosed my mother with lung cancer and at the time, it was like the world had come crumbling down on me. The various oncologists and the radiologists were not giving us any hope for my mother’s condition had deteriorated far beyond repair and by the time we got around to the chemotherapy and radiation therapy, my mother’s lung capacity had declined to an alarming level. She was facing difficulty in breathing and many times, she had to drag an oxygen tank with her wherever she went to help her keep up with the body’s requirement of oxygen. The treatment had also made her pretty weak and weary, and this is the reason why making her comfortable had become our number one priority.
So when the doctors were done with all that they could do to help her, my mother was brought back home where she could be made to feel comfortable and to help her in getting around, there was a nurse that we had hired for help. Through the entirety of the ordeal, we had seen too many hospitals and talked to just as many doctors. Fortunately, there were also a number of nurses who were helping us through the process, and this is a part of the series of events that I wouldn’t have changed. So while the doctors were treating my mother as a patient, a machine with a problem to fix, the nurses did not share their perspective. They were much more compassionate and sympathetic to our problem, and they were all treating my mother as an actual person who had a family, a son, a daughter and a husband.
They had been trained well regarding how to comfort and soothe the people through their greatest suffering for I found the entire nursing staff to be just as gentle with us as it was then dealing with and caring for my mother. I found each and every nurse we dealt with to possess a
very high level of emotional intelligence for while the doctors gave us the medicines to take and the precautions, their consideration went well beyond the following of instructions. When they saw that my mother was growing wearing to lying down all day, they made attempts at taking her outside, a change that impacted my mother’s mood in a very positive manner.
There were also times towards the end when my mother made it a habit of acting like a child, and she had to be force-fed and bathed just like children have to be taken care of. The two nursing that was switching shifts between the days and the nights were there to make sure that she did not go hungry and that she was as comfortable as she could possibly be made to feel. We saw our mother very sick for three months of her diagnosis and immediately following, this time; she passed away. Even though we had been preparing ourselves for that day for three months, we still felt like she had gone away too soon. We had barely enough time to get closure what with all of the checkups and the visits to the hospital for the treatment.
Through the hardest possible time, those two women had stayed by our side day and night, a service that could never be brought with money. Unlike my first impression of the nurses, they were not only focused on the patient and getting their job done was not their only motivation. They had so much empathy for what our family was going through. They had tried to share the burden with us through the worst of times, and I couldn’t have asked for any friend or relative through that time.
Through the same inspiration and the spirit to help others, I later went back to school to further continue my education and today, I am on my way to becoming a nurse. My passion is to
help ease some one’s pain and try and share the same burden just like someone else had done for me in my time of need. I want to be able to relieve some of the fear and the burden that patients feel when suffering from terminal illnesses, and I want to be of help and at the same time, I would also like to relieve people of their emotional burdens.
As I finish my nursing education, I would like to be trained to take care of terminal patients because through my experience, I have come to know that that is where I can make the greatest difference. I want to provide something in addition to what the doctors can provide. I want to help people beyond medicine and precautions.
I want to make them feel that we care for them not just because we want them to be well. Rather, that we care for who they are; that we care about them because we know they have families to look after who care about them too. I want to go that extra mile with my patient where I can make a distinction between trying to cure and trying to care. This is my passion, one that has kept me going on the path that I now take.