Truant Officer to Critical Care Nurse

© Photograph by Alex Harris

I was in my early fifties when I decided to go into nursing. I was a truant officer, investigating why students were not attending school. I liked it but didn’t think I could learn any more after fifteen or twenty years. I was sort of a coward: I wanted to have a pension, and I wanted to have health care. I could have left years before, but I didn’t. I waited until I knew that I would be secure financially.

Now I’m a critical care nurse and I work at the Level One trauma hospital in Detroit, primarily in cardiac intensive care. I want my work to be difficult so I can keep my mind sharp and stay physically fit and all of that. Inside of me is a person who wants to sit down and eat potato chips, so I couldn’t be in a situation in which that person emerged. I’m not interested in that. I’m going to live my life until it’s over. I’m not going to just sit around.

I do this for the excitement. I like drama. I like health. I want to be healthy. I don’t want to spend my remaining years on this planet not well. When you see the things people are dealing with, this thing just keeps playing in your mind: Keep it together, keep it together! In nursing you have to be up to the challenge all the time. You have to be strong, to be able to turn patients over and help them stand up.

Working in a hospital and seeing death a lot and having to do postmortem care, you see that one second you’re alive and the next you’re gone, and you can tell. It’s like the soul or whatever that is really departs, and you realize that you’re only looking at an empty something there. That essence that made that a person is gone.

It makes you think about life: What have you done to make life better for yourself, for others? Have you made someone smile? Have you shown you care? Because it’s going to come to this for all of us. The most important thing that I’ve learned in my whole life is that in life you really have to do exactly what it is that you wish to do, within reason. If you have a goal—a book to write or a job to do—you should do it.”

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