Personal Narrative: A Career As A Nursing Student

This past spring and summer I spent my time while not in school volunteering at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. I am interested in pursuing a nursing major, so I was looking for any way I could get a feel for the life of a nurse, and ways that I could help out my community in the process. I was talking about my interest in nursing with a lady at my school one day, and she mentioned that her daughter had participated in this program at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital and thoroughly enjoyed it. After looking into the program some, I immediately submitted an application to be able to join. I began volunteering there in March of 2015, and enjoyed every minute of it. While volunteering there, my role in the program was to bring patients and
Watching the younger kids was the hardest. They were so young and full of life, but they were stuck in a hospital room attached to IV’s and other monitors. For a little while it gave you a kind of hopeless feeling, because they were sick and there was nothing you could do to make them feel better. This is why the other teen volunteers and I were there for though. We played with the kids and made them smile and just listened if they wanted someone to talk to. One of my absolute favorite moments while volunteering was when you first walked into a room and saw a patient that you knew from last time they were in the hospital. The kids would get the biggest smile on their faces and want to tell you all about what they had been doing since the last time you saw them. The time spent at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital was definitely life changing. It let me bless kids in need, and also allowed the kids I was around to affect the way I think. It taught me to consider what struggles people may be going through instead of immediately judging or labeling them. Being a part of this program caused me to not only value my health and life, but also taught me that everyone has struggles in their life that can be