I Had a Dream: Student Nurse to Nurse Practitioner

Amy was an ambitious teenager who studied hard and did well in school. When she approached her parents about her dream of becoming a doctor, she was faced with the family’s lack of funds to send all four of the children to college. In addition to Amy’s desire to be a physician, she wanted to leave home and make her way in the world. Her mother, despite their differences, was sensitive to Amy’s desires as she herself went through the same dilemmas when she was a young woman. As an alternative, Amy agreed to go to nursing school. In the 1960s, student nurses lived in a hospital dormitory and went to school for thirty-six months without a break and graduated with a diploma. Amy knew that she needed more education in order to succeed in her chosen specialty of critical care nursing. To fulfill this goal, she began attending classes after graduation and to fulfill her desire to travel, she left her home state of Nebraska and set off to the southwest. For the next fifteen years, she traveled, moving to several cities, continued her studies, spent six weeks in Europe and advanced in her critical care nurse career. Amy was not one to shy away from risk taking and she volunteered for many duties and accepted new responsibilities that her co-workers didn’t pursue. After fifteen years in the intensive care unit, she expanded her career into occupational health nursing and found her second career love. In time, she realized that she needed more ambulatory care education and went back to school to become a nurse practitioner. Today, in retirement she realized that her disappointment at not attending medical school was only the beginning of a wonderful career in nursing and medicine,