I remember the day well …the day I told my daddy I wanted to be a nurse. I had just finished my freshman year at Georgia Southern University. Reeling from the rigors of Organic Chemistry, which this high school honor graduate barely passed with a C, and only because grades were curved as I never made higher than 50% on any exam, I realized my future as a medical technologist was bleak. I mean after all, when you spend all of your time holed up in a study room in your dorm and only get a C in a difficult class, when everyone else is out drinking at the bar and your roommate never sleeps in your dorm room you share, you feel lonely and ask yourself  … “What am I doing here?”

I didn’t realize when I left Georgia Southern at the end of the second semester that I wouldn’t be back. I enrolled at Macon Junior College to pick up a couple of classes and I had a professor nearly convince me to change my career path altogether to theater. During one of my classes I took that summer (an English pre-requisite for undergrad), we were given an assignment and a young man and I were paired together. We decided to act out the scene “Somewhere ” from the Broadway hit, West Side Story. I played the character, Maria. Who knew I could sing? And act? What fun! We got an A, a standing ovation from the class and my professor asked if I had ever considered majoring in Theater. WHAT?! My “theater experience” was as a backup singer in our annual high school Follies … and I say “theater experience” loosely. I almost laughed in her face, but caught myself and thanked her for the compliment and the A.

That summer I ran into a high school friend and as we sat talking one night about the uncertainty of life, she suggested I look into nursing school. And something clicked in my brain. To this day I believe she was my angel from God delivering a message. A month later, after daddy couldn’t sway my decision for a life of long shifts and hard work, he drove me to Memphis, TN, where I began my nursing training at the Baptist Memorial Hospital School of Nursing. Baptist Hospital was the largest private hospital in the world at that time with close to 2000 beds. It was well known for excellence in patient care and it was a training hospital for nurses, medical students and intern/residents programs as well.

Anyway, back to my calling by God to nursing school. Whereas I thought Organic Chemistry was rough at Georgia Southern, boy was it ever an eye opener to the rigors of nursing school! The late night hours studying and writing care plans and the early morning clinicals and afternoon classes were grueling. But oh the fun we had … amazing the fun you can have at an all girls Baptist affiliated school! We lived in an old, cold ten story dorm. We had a house mother and curfews and you got demerits if your room wasn’t clean on bedcheck days. Alcohol and cigarettes were not permitted, so I was always the “guard” for my ever so hip California roommate to warn her if the house mother was making rounds, while she was blowing cigarette smoke out of the bathroom window. We had a rooftop that we enjoyed sunbathing on. And we had the best all women’s choral group called The Nightingales. We sang at local churches and at hopital open houses and holiday events.

Oh nursing was difficult for sure, but what a wonderful education I received. And the most wonderful of lifelong friends I made. Some flunked out .. only 62% of our beginning freshman class made it to graduation. One student was asked to leave when she tried to sneak out one night to be with her boyfriend. Sure hope he was worth the broken ankle she received when she jumped out of the second story dorm window! Anytime you told someone you were a BMH grad, people would nearly bow down. We were revered … no lie.

After graduation, I chose to work in the Surgical-Neuro Intensive Care Unit. And my, oh my. I’ll never forget my first code or the first time I lost a patient. Was I really cut out for this? I wondered. We had two patients to care for and I’d run back and forth between a patient all banged up and in traction from a near fatal motorcycle crash to the farmer who was crushed under his tractor to the patient trached and on a ventilator, who during trach care would beg me for a cigarette … dying from lung cancer. Patients with DIC and sepsis, me administering platelets as fast as the patient bled out nearly every orifice, patients whose beds I couldn’t keep clean because they were on so many IV antibiotics that their bowels were so loose it was all I could do to keep them clean and dry so their skin wouldn’t breakdown and get a bedsore. (Now that’s a run on sentence with all kinds of grammatical errors, but I’m on a roll!)  I would walk into that hospital five days a week in street clothes, change into scrubs and before I knew it, I was wrist deep in a belly wounds doing wet to dry dressing changes, managing Swan Ganz lines, helping docs put in thoracic chest tubes, watching cardiac monitors, praying I didn’t see v. fib or v. tach or God forbid a flatline on a monitor. In those days we worked eight hour shifts. I wonder how nurses today work twelve hour shifts. I was so dog tired after working my eight hours and when some were heading out to party after work, I was draped over the back of the sofa like a wet dishrag trying to get a few bites of Ramen Noodles down before hitting the sack at 7:30 pm.

After a year working in ICU, the school of nursing approached me to teach Freshman Nursing classes. Me? I was flabbergasted. I had no teaching experience! And the minute Mrs. Goss, the BMH School of Nursing Dean found out they wanted to hire me to teach, well, surely that would be the end of that! She was the one standing on the other side of the elevator door when it opened my senior year just as I was ever so melodiously singing to the top of my lungs, 🎶 “Hambone, hambone chicken and a gravy! Gonna go find me a ball headed baby!” 🎶 Maybe, just maybe, she overlooked that since I had such perfect pitch! Haha! Or maybe she overlooked it as I was an excellent student, receiving one of the top awards at graduation. I didn’t graduate with the highest GPA so still to this day I am uncertain what the Hospital Auxiliary Award represented but I was told it is given to the best all around student. All I know is that day at the awards luncheon I was not feeling well from a bad cold so when my name was announced I was just a clapping away for that chick, and good grief what was taking her so long to get up and receive that beautiful gold award because I was ready for the main course! Low and behold my roommate smacks me up side da head and says “Get up dummy! She called YOUR name!” What?! Me?! How about those horse apples!

Anyway, I suppose Mrs. Goss forgave my boisterous rendition of Hambone and sure enough, the school where I trained hired me to teach! I had never done any public speaking and unbeknownst to many who know me now, I was incredibly shy back in those days. Oh, I wasn’t shy around my friends … but around those I didn’t know … yep, very shy and introverted. I had no idea how I was gonna ever muster up the courage to lecture to 150 students … in an auditorium … on a stage … behind a podium with a microphone and all. And that my friends is when my life of comedy began. I’ll never forget my nerves being so on edge that I decided I had to do something to lighten the seriousness of the matter. After all, I was these girls first introduction to nursing school! The class title was The Fundamentals of Nursing: Problems with Elimination. So I did what surely all instructors who had come before me to calm my nerves and the students as well … I put on a scrub dress and taped a bedpan to my hind end and walked out on that stage as if I was severely constipated … you know kinda like Vicki Lawrences character on Mama’s Family. And the masses roared with laughter. And then I peeled that bedpan off and proceeded to tell those young ladies that I was a lot of fun, but to never test that because I had every intention to teach a hard class. I expected preparation on their part. But oh, isn’t there always at least one in every group that likes to see if you mean business? Why, oh, why did it have to be one of my best and favorite students who showed up on the unit without a plan of care? I wasn’t the slightest bit nice and told her to march herself right back to the dorm and with a failing grade.

Yep, teaching was an absolute blast. But I was so picky grading those care plans that I nearly drove those girls crazy. What they didn’t understand was I didn’t really care as much if they wrote down every minute detail of how to administer patient care. Nope, what I was looking for was their perseverance and attitude for details. They not only were giving nursing care under my hard earned license but they needed to understand that if they could pay attention to presenting a detailed plan of care, then I knew they would be observant to all the details of a patients medical status. Ask an ICU nurse and she will be the first to tell you how quickly a patients medical status can change. Observation skills are critical to excellent patient care … knowing drugs, the meaning of low urine output post-operatively, what the Glasgow Coma Scale is … so many things a good nurse must be able to pick up on are critical to life and death. It had to be impressed upon them that they needed to know the difference between Tagamet and Tegretol and Tetracycline … one being an antacid, another an anticonvulsant and another an antibiotic … not to mention all the different types of insulin, a Dopamine drip or heaven help the patient needing Amiodarone or a Cardizem drip. I took the Florence Nightingale oath seriously and I expected them to do the same.

And yep, we had some interesting situations … I will never forget the young 18 year student asking if I’d help her finish the bath of a comatose, male patient since the male attendant was otherwise occupied in another room. Well of course I would help her, and what a surprise we got when we finished that bath and found a tattoo on his private part. Her face turned beet red from embarrassment and mine turned beet red from having to hold my breath to keep from laughing. After clinical that morning she pulled me aside and asked how they do that. And I said, “Honey, only God knows how inane things happen in this world!”

My first nursing class selected me as their student advisor and I grew an affection for each one of my students always keeping humor at the forefront of our instructor/ student relationship, yet reminding them it was only fun and games if they met my expectations. It was a wonderful group of young ladies and I wish I knew which ones made it to graduation and what field of nursing they chose as their specialty.

That year Annual Field Day was rained out so we just held it in the activity room in the dorm. I still have the photo that was printed in the BMH Newsletter that month with the heading, Sharon Moore, School of Nursing Instructor, plays the good sport at Annual Field Day … the photo where my students were trying to win the race of who could mummify their instructor the quickest with toilet paper. I was having every bit as much fun as they were.

Those were some good times, let me tell ya. And had we not moved to Mississippi, I am certain I would have traded that diploma nursing degree for a bachelors and masters so I could have pursued my love of teaching.

Nursing school and then teaching nursing school were some of the most challenging but definitely some of the BEST days of my life. They were fond memories of a time before life became more complicated with having a family and raising children and experiencing some of the most difficult times in my life. But I believe most of life, if not all of it, is God ordained for sure. Without Him I could not have made it through the rigorous studies of nursing school and all the challenges that brought.

I am so grateful to still be walking the face of this earth hoping my stories touch someone. I’ve grown to be so unapologetically me. I tell my friends and even complete strangers these stories because I know they hit home for many. And isn’t it easier to read someone else’s story rather than write your own? Or is it?

My lesson for today is I relish the joy and wonderful times I had training to be a nurse. I hope those of you that took the time to read this (by the way, thank you for doing so), will be blessed with laughter and fond memories of your days of nursing school and your beginning years in your field. If you’re reading this and you are not a nurse, I encourage you to reflect back to the early days in your chosen career. I know every profession has wonderful stories and memories to be shared with those youngsters starting out. Those in a career that serves others or deals with other human beings can write their own books, I just bet!

I plan to write a follow up story to this one soon. It’s in the works right now, but in my promise to keep my writings positive, inspirational and uplifting, I am having to give great thought and consideration of that topic. There are difficult things you experience as a nurse, for sure, but how to present that and how to present that God pulls you through those days will be a bit more of a challenge. I can do it! I know I can!

Hope you continue reading as I’m Sharon A Smile!