I’ve always loved being a patient. Perhaps that’s why I became a nurse. (Of course, it’s easy for me to like being a patient when the only things I have ever been hospitalized for were a tonsilecomy and the birth of my son.)

And I’ve always loved hospitals, the same way that I love airports. They are both places where big things happen; arrivals, departures, births, deaths.

When I was twenty years old, I had my tonsils removed. I woke up in a haze in the PACU and there in front of me was Janice, a girl I knew from my first job scooping ice cream at the mall. The one thing that I remembered about Janice was that she always knew she wanted to be a nurse. That was her plan. And here she was, 4 years later, a nurse.

“Janice!” I said. Boy did that scare the crap out of her. How many times does your post-op patient sit bolt upright and call you by your name?

I asked if she remembered me from the ice cream store.

She studied my face. “Oh, yeah, I do remember you,” she said. Then I fell back asleep.

Later on I thought about Janice, and how much I respected her ability to follow through with her career plans. Here I was, a floundering college student, majoring in fine art but clueless as to how I was going to leverage my education into a career. And here was Janice, already ensconced in a career, working as a nurse. It occurred to me that nurses really know how to get stuff done.

I think that’s where my reverence for nursing started.

A few days later, one of my tonsilectomy stitches popped open. Blood was oozing from my throat into my stomach, and I eventually fainted in the doctor’s office. I ended up with an ambulance ride back to the hospital so they could repair the stitches. The next day I woke up and discovered that once again, my nurse was yet another person that I knew from high school. Again, I was so impressed. The idea of her already having a career made me feel a little more lost than I needed to feel at the time.

Fast forward 10 years. I was fed up with all of the careers I had tried and gotten no satisfaction from. My husband convinced me I should try my hand at sales. Why not? Can’t rule it out until I’ve tried it. After some job fairs and interviews, I found myself shadowing a copy machine salesperson in preparation for my new sales job. Yes, I was about to embark on a career of selling copy machines.

Our first sales call was a doctor’s office. We asked who was in charge of ordering office supplies, and we were introduced to a couple of very busy looking nurses. My first and immediate thought was this:

These nurses have real jobs. As a salesperson, I am interrupting the real work that needs to be done.

(If there are any salespeople out there, please take no offense. This was just my personal reaction to the situation. And now that I am a health care professional, I appreciate those of you who are in medical sales. Without you the purchasing department of our hospitals might have us using thermometers with mercury in them. Come to think of it, without copy machine salespeople we might still be using the mimeograph.)

This was April. By September I was enrolled in an Anatomy and Physiology class, in preparation for nursing school.

So what did I mean by “real job” and “real work”? I wasn’t quite sure at the time; it just kind of popped into my head and it seemed to ring true. Now that I am a nurse I know exactly what it meant, which is this: I might go home from work feeling exhausted, frustrated, or even sad. But I never go home from work thinking that I wasn’t doing something important, something meaningful. Something that needed to be done on that particular day, for that particular patient. It’s a very satisfying feeling. Once you have the “meaningful job” nailed down, it frees you to go on with the rest of your life.