Guest Column | I nurse, you nurse, we nurse

When I first meet people at Penn, I go through the standard introduction, which usually goes like this:

“Hi, My name is Maddie.”

“Oh hey, what do you study here?”

“I am a nursing student! What about you?”

And then they usually say something other than nursing and we move on in the conversation. But more often than not, we get to a point in the where the person might say something like:

“So, what made you choose nursing? ” or, “Why did you decide against being a pre-med and going to medical school?”

That is how most general introductory conversations go.

Now, I understand where people are coming from. Nurses are infamous. What do you think of when you think nurse? A slutty Halloween costume? That lady that makes you feel fat when you go to the doctors office? The endlessly cheerful Nurse Joy that healed all your Pokémon with a Chansey in tow? Maybe you think of a random aunt of yours, or the women in front of you in line at Lynn’s food truck, when you clearly need your breakfast sandwich first. Maybe you had contests with your siblings at the doctor’s office about who’s nurse had the most outrageous patterned scrubs. Which is better: all over Tigger or repeating cupcakes?

And I agree, I think of all these things too. In fact, I thought of them myself. But I thought about it for a long time and I think that there is benefit to helping other people understand why some people choose nursing as a career. And even more importantly, how you all are, in a way, nurses.

Let me tell you a bit about why I voluntarily pay exorbitant amounts of money to be forced to wake up at 5:30 in the morning and work for 12 straight hours.

In your junior year at Penn nursing, you have to rotate through an obstetrical floor. Over the course of my time at the floor I had a variety of women come to give birth under my team’s care. The patient population was varied. I had the classic well-off lady come in with her balloons and her food and her birth ball and five million family members all with a separate onesie and hat that they felt the baby should wear immediately after exiting it’s mother’s uterus.

I also had patients that were impoverished and with no prenatal care. I had mothers with AIDS, mothers who were in withdraw from drugs while giving birth and mothers that were 14 years old. I tried to process in my head how such different people could all be here, all be going through the same thing. I was struck by the beauty of it all: it was the first moment in my life when I felt an essence of innate humanness — that these women were all going through the same thing with the same pain and the same panic and the same love, doing something that people have done for thousands of years. It was so basic and so beautiful. I think about it every day. The human moments I encounter during my shifts at the hospital are why I am sure that nursing is the right career for me.

I am not telling you all of this to try and convince you to run over to Fagin Hall and sign up for nursing school (because let’s face it, who actually wants to put in the effort to locate Fagin on the campus map and then go out of your way to walk there? Stressful, I know.) And I am not trying to compare the job of nurses to that of other health professionals — that is a different conversation for a different time. I chose to talk about this for two reasons. One is that every one of you here is in some way a nurse. I know that you all, once in your life, have taken care of another person and thought about their well-being. You have identified a problem and made a plan to address it — maybe not with an IV drip, but a pint of Ben & Jerry’s or constant, intense hugs. You don’t need a degree or certification to help save a life, and I think it is important that everyone recognize that communities are built on the human tendency to care for one another, and that includes you.

Secondly, I wanted to share my story to encourage you all to constantly watch for moments that contain what I feel is “basic humanness.” Maybe that’s not a technical term, but what ever it is, it is beautiful when you recognize it. You can find it in so many aspects of your life — maybe you are in a fit of uncontrollable laughter with a friend from some nonsensical moment of humor. In the midst of passionate, wild, beautiful sex. In the middle of a deep conversation with a person you love. Or in raw anguish over the death of a friend. In my opinion, the brief moments that make us the most human are the moments that we most often overlook.

So, if you take anything away from this column, let it be these things: contact me if you are having a baby, use the buddy system when attempting to find Fagin. Eat pints on pints of ice cream with your friends and take some time in your life to find the “human moments.” They could be some of the best moments of your life.

Maddie Wilson is a nursing junior. Her email address is madwil@nursing.upenn.edu.

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