My Life as an RN: 5 Years In

Who am I and why am I starting a blog?
1) I am one year away from graduating with my Masters in Nursing and earning my Advanced Practice RN certification and I feel like I am in a cloud of nurse emotions.
2) I feel as though I am forgetting my first love and why I fell in love in the first place: nursing.
3) My mind is a muddle of things as I'm beginning a new chapter in my life and I feel the need to get some concrete words on the screen to make myself feel more real.

I have been a cardiothoracic surgery nurse since I graduated from Quinnipiac University in 2009. I worked in New Haven for 2 and half years and now I've been working on the Upper East Side of NYC for the same amount of time.

I made the decision to go back to school to get my Family Nurse Practitioner after working in New York for about 6 months. At time I've felt useless as a nurse and at times I've felt as if I'm the only one that matters to a patient. There have been times when I've struggled to push down my own feelings and times when I've felt like I don't have any left. Isn't that the hallmark of a nurse? Wondering where the feelings have gone and then not being surprised when they rush back all at once while talking to a family member of a beloved dying patient? Is it this emotion sickness that pushed me away from the bedside and to study to be a white coat wearing prescription writing family history inquiring practitioner? Was it something more simple, such as the realization that in 5 years when I (hopefully) have a household full of kids and dogs, that I will want to work hours that normal human beings work and not have to work holidays and weekends? Or was it the fact that at the point that my patients reach me, they are already suffering from so many different diseases that I wonder how they've made it this far? Eh, it's probably a combination of all of those, it's hard to pinpoint which one is more important from one day to the next.

I'm married to a wonderful man that I met at nursing school who then became a cop for the NYPD in 2012. We recently moved out of the city to the suburbs which couldn't have made me happier. Besides not knowing anyone up here besides our neighbors who are all over the age of 65, it's the perfect place for me to plant myself.

What else interests me?
Running, baking, cooking, reading. I know I'm so interesting. But perhaps while I don't write about nursey things, I will write about sugar and flour and the joys of training for marathons with my little sister.