There are more than a handful of nursing schools in the city where I live. And it just so happens that the director of one of these schools is also a graduate and the president of the alumni board at the nursing school I graduated from. I was invited there to participate in a panel discussion not too long ago where some of us recent grads talked and answered the questions of the students who were about to graduate and make the transition from student to professional. This director/president was the facilitator of the panel discussion and at the end of the event she handed me her card and said simply, “Come teach for us.” I was initially sort of shocked and honored that she would think to say that to someone she had never met before that night and someone who only threw out a couple ideas and pieces of advice for the graduating students. I shoved the card into my purse and assumed she had most likely given her card to everyone at that panel. “So what?” said a friend. “You’re making excuses.” Said my therapist. “Whatever.” I said. But then, a few weeks ago, I thought, Why not? So, I dug out her card and emailed her, reminding her of who I was and basically said I was interested in teaching because my best days on the job were the ones I got to spend with students. I said it’s tough being a new professional. I said that I am always trying to expand my community of people who understand the emotional and physical and intellectual challenges of direct care. I asked if I could pick her brain sometime about how someone with a master’s degree in nursing might head in the direction of teaching. She wrote me back within the hour and proposed we have a conversation over dinner.
Two weeks later we sat a local thai food restaurant, her drinking wine and me drinking beer, discussing some alumni issues at our alma mater. I mentioned that I felt that one of the communities I found a home in during grad school was the fairly established humanities and medicine culture and that I haven’t quite been able to find the same sense of home here. I told her about the writing workshops I’d been a part of, the writing award ceremonies I’d attended and, more importantly, how the worlds of art and science felt like they were continuously feeding each other while I was in school.
“Why don’t you teach an elective class in literature and medicine for my students?” She said. “Like a 1 credit class where you’d meet like 4 or 6 times over the course of the semester…we’d pay you of course, and there’s some paper work you need to complete with your objectives and a syllabus, things like that…Every student has to take at least 4 credits of electives and there are not that many offered…”
“Are you kidding?”
“Um, no?”
“I’d do it even if you didn’t pay me. I’ll do it for sure. That would be so amazing.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course we’d pay. It’s work, right? I’ll send you all the paper work when I get home so you can get started. I think the students will love it.”
I took a swing of beer. Why was this so so so easy? We kept talking about nursing, teaching, how she got to where she is today…and I asked her how I could start to teach actual clinical skills to students.
“Well,” she said, “You send me your CV, I forward it on to the people who do
Again , shocked. So. Easy.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” I said. Yes, I said that. I actually asked her why she was being nice to me. But, in all honesty, I really could not understand why this was all going so smoothly. When every other part of my life feels like a struggle, why was this just…happening?
“Well,” she said, “We’re both alums of the same school, you’re smart and you really want to do this. Why not?”
“You are so great.” I said. Again, I’m not sure how this kind of dialogue fits in with professional interviewing strategies but hey, it was genuine, right?
“Well I think you’re so great. I wasn’t planning on coming here to recruit new teachers and I didn’t know how much of a passion you had for this. So, I think we both win.”
She walked me most of the way to my house and then she continued on to her own home. We made a plan for me to send her a description of what the class might look like, she told me to say hi to a few of the L and D nurses at my hospital that came through her program and she asked me to send her my resume.
And that was that. The process is underway. A new little path is starting to come into view, one that actually makes me excited for, not fearful of, the future. One that makes me feel totally calm about taking risks, about being wholly responsible for something and completely, completely accepting of the fact that I will certainly make mistakes. It’s true that I’ve only been a participant, not a facilitator, of a humanities and medicine class but this just feels right. Maybe all things are supposed to feel this easy. And, even if not, it’s really nice when something comes along that is.
