Medical Field Experience

When I was ten years old I can recall a visit with my Great Grandmother who began to share her stories of an amazing fifty year nursing career. The excitement shined through her eyes as she told me about the patients who have changed her life. With that excitement there was also a sadness in her voice as she told me about the patients she was unable to save. In the 1940’s nursing was a much different field than it is today, she remembers when penicillin was first introduced. Nursing in her day was much about the patient care and building relationships with the patients you were caring for. Having patients that you had a connection with, conversations with, and loved they stay with you for the rest of your life.The stories she shared with me
imbedded a yearning to want to help people and make a difference in someone's life. She was my inspiration to join in the medical field.

I began my journey into the medical field by starting a emergency medical technician class.
I learned everything there is to know about being an EMT and maintaining a well stocked and efficient ambulance. I remember my first trauma patient, she was a female who had been so severely beaten, her family couldn't recognize her face. Walking into a room and seeing this chaos, hearing the screaming ,and smelling the blood is something I can never forget. There is an adrenaline rush you get a feeling of knowing you are what stands in the way of this person living or dying. My heart felt as if was going to beat right out of my chest, but it was at that moment my training kicked in. I run through my “trauma patient checklist” in my head and it's as if you become a robot and you do your job and get your patient to safety. In that fifteen minutes of chaos where I felt my world was falling apart, I realized this was my calling and I had to continue in this career
field.

Being on an ambulance was great, but eventually my body gave out and I became a hospital based EMT. Meaning I only worked in the emergency room department. I continued my career and began gaining addition certification for emergency medicine, life safety and dealing with stressful events. I have been working in the ER for seven years and I have seen some of the worst things you can imagine. It takes a special type of person to be able to handle dealing with death, birth, and being blamed for everything wrong in your patient's life. In between those moments you get that occasional patient so thanks you for sitting with them talking trying to keep their mind occupied as they waited for the result of their blood work. Those patients are the reason I go back every day to know and feel like I'm making a difference in the world. After working in the ER for seven years I was perfectly content with my job ,I was happy I felt I was in the position I was meant for, until one day changed all of that.

I have felt with death on many occasions but it took this one day to change the course of my career.
One cold winter night while at work we get a call from emergency medical services (EMS) saying they are bringing us an unresponsive two year old and they will be here in three minutes. The staff scrambles to get our trauma room ready and brace ourselves mentally. The ambulance pulls in and I see the paramedic doing CPR on a little girl and as they pull into the room I see that this is my little cousin. At that moment my heart sank, but I need to stay focused and do my job. An hour in the doctor says there is nothing more he can do so he calls the time of death. Mariah Ann Pratt was her name she was a twin and she died in my ER, her mother and I grew up together,I was there the day she was born and the day she died. Her mother came into the room, grabbed onto me and cried out for me to do something, to save her baby. That was the single worst day of my life and I felt completely helpless. In that tragedy I realized I could do so much more. I had be content with my career but I was capable of doing so much more. That's when I decided to go back to school and get my nursing
degree.