Upon entering the nursing program, I hadn’t exactly known why I wanted to choose nursing as my career. At the beginning of every semester, each professor would ask the same question, “Why nursing?” And every semester I would have the same uncertainty. I was pushing through and enduring the stress of nursing school but without purpose.
Before nursing school, I hadn’t had any experience or interaction with the medical field, but during my first semester, my grandfather was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and my experience began.
He was in and out of the hospital almost every few weeks, was on supplemental oxygen at home, and we were taking him to see every specialist across Massachusetts and Rhode Island. With each interaction, his spirit and eagerness to heal seemed to dissipate and he began self-medicating with alcohol. He was already a stubborn man, and the excessive use of alcohol only furthered his obstinance.
Within a few months, his lungs had stiffened, and his only option was to receive a transplant. Before my grandfather could process this information, he was being prepped for surgery as a pair of lungs became available within 24 hours of being placed on the transplant list. Overall, the procedure went well, and he was home within 6 weeks.
Within the first day home, he refused all nursing care and within the first month, he stopped taking all medications. He began drinking again and was subsequently hospitalized for transplant rejection. I quickly came to the realization that the illness, although treatable, had taken away his want to live.
At the same time, I began my first clinical experience, working with patients at a small short-term rehabilitation center. Ten weeks into my clinical rotation, my grandfather became severely ill, and I was assigned my first patient on hospice. I remember it vividly, laying my hand on his chest to feel the apneic breaths, hearing the death rattle, his daughters crying behind me, and watching him take his last breath.
A week later, I was once again sitting on a hospital bed with a hand on the chest of a man taking his last breath, except it wasn’t a patient, it was my grandfather. I watched him take his last breath, I kissed his cool forehead, and I walked out of the hospital feeling empty, helpless, and like an absolute failure.
The next day, I was set to go to clinical, and though I was told to stay home, something told me I needed to go. I woke up the next day, drove to clinical, walked into the room of the patient I had been taking care of for 11 weeks, and ultimately realized the answer to the question, “Why nursing?”
Why nursing? I want to become a nurse because it’s a gift in a complicated world. It’s a privilege to experience life in its most basic form, to be part of the worst and best moments of people’s lives, to provide comfort when it’s the very last thing someone may feel. Many never see the fragility of life, but as nurses, we have the opportunity to see it each day. We see it taken quickly and taken slowly, we give it back, and we bring it into the world while simultaneously holding the hands of the people who value these lives more than we could ever know.
So, when I’m asked, “Why nursing?” I simply say that I couldn’t imagine myself in any other career. I couldn’t imagine choosing to work where I’m not able to care for others, to be the stability in someone’s most unstable parts of their lives, and to advocate for those, like my grandfather, who wanted nothing more than for someone to just listen. All in all, to choose nursing, for me, is to heal others while simultaneously healing the parts of myself that have so desperately needed it after having felt as if I had failed one of the most important people in my life.
Lilye Lasko is a BSN nursing student
