Coming Home to Nursing: A Career Change Eases a Return to a Small Town

“Working as a nurse in the county where your family has lived for seven generations has a social complexity that can’t be prepared for.”

The Reflections essay in the September issue of AJN isn’t focused on a dire clinical situation, a wrenching ethical quandary, or a challenging coworker or boss. Called “Coming Home to Nursing,” the essay describes the many ways becoming a nurse helped the author begin to feel a sense of belonging when she returned to her small town. Here’s the opening:

Illustration by Gingermoth for AJN. All rights reserved. Illustration by Gingermoth for AJN. All rights reserved.

I had been taking care of people, in one way or another, for as long as I could remember, first growing up in Maine and then for 20 years in New York City. I had returned to my small town to help care for my mother, who had end-stage Parkinson’s disease. After she died, I felt a void. I looked around at this tiny place, where people are considered to be “from away” even if they’ve lived here for multiple generations. I wondered what I had to give back to the supportive community I’d grown up a part of—and I also wondered if I could fit in after 20 years away. Could I turn my love of taking care […]

2016-11-21T13:02:02-05:00September 8th, 2015|career, narratives, Nursing, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Still a Nurse: A Shift in Professional Identity

Illustration by Jennifer Rodgers. All rights reserved. Illustration by Jennifer Rodgers. All rights reserved.

The June Reflections, “Making It Fit,” is a frank exploration of the ways health care professionals form separate cultures within each institution. It’s told by a newly minted advanced practice nurse whose previous job had been as a staff nurse in an ED. Now she’s taken a job as a psychiatric NP and finds herself on uncertain ground:

When I walked onto the unit my first day, expecting to be embraced by the nurses, I was dumbfounded and hurt that my own profession didn’t accept me with open arms. The inpatient unit is a melting pot of professions, and I found that I didn’t necessarily fit with the doctors, the social workers, or the staff nurses.

The author finds herself alone, neither nurse nor physician but instead something in between. As she describes her process of finding a new kind of nursing identity, she is very clear that this is not a case of nurses “eating their young.” Rather, it’s about finding a new normal. The short essay is an honest, smart look at career advancement and the associated challenges we hear less about, and is well worth a read.—Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

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2016-11-21T13:04:29-05:00June 19th, 2014|career, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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