It’s been a while since my last post but I’ve been saving up and meticulously planning for a solid drop when the time felt right. I’ve been working perdiem in an emergency room as a nurse apprentice outside a city on the west coast while finishing my RN which I will soon complete and then…
Category: Trauma
Happy Emergency Nurses Week
Every day I get to go to work, I act as though I don’t deserve to be there. I feel like an imposter. I feel like I’m on the verge of ruining everything and getting fired. But I’ve found out, as a baby nurse, this feeling is expected. What fears that once ate me alive…
So I Did a Beauty Pageant
“We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson That summer, I took up a job in medical records in my dad’s office where I spent the day in a basement inputting patient’s labs and health history forms. It was a grueling…
Dimestore Cowgirl
Shortly after I was fit for my prosthetic, my mom insisted I participate in the local beauty pageant. Barf. I was drugged up and missing a hand but sure. Why not? At that time I wore my prosthetic daily and was getting used to being stared at by people wherever I went. I stopped caring…
Sad but Pretty
I went to my winter formal at the time knowing that that Tuesday following the weekend, would forever change my life. I took a bath the Sunday night before we left for UCLA and I looked at my hands. I would never be a neurosurgeon with one hand. My hands were pretty. My mom insisted…
Pancakes
Some of my best memories I have of growing up with my dad are making pancakes. My dad and I were both early risers and found ourselves in the kitchen in the early morning whisking egg whites until they were firm and folding them into batter, only to make the fluffiest pancakes. National Geographic had…
Diagnosis
You know how once you get your life back on track something comes and knocks you down again? Same. Remember that hand pain? Me too. It was still there and getting worse. My dad and I went to a hand specialist in Santa Barbara to have the cyst removed right before Christmas. I was awake…
The Broken Heart
I like to think that I handled it maturely. That August 21 I was scheduled for a bovine valve replacement. My mom joked that the surgery would make me into a real cowgirl-hilarious. My hand still hurt. That summer my mom insisted I get an x-ray and nothing appeared wrong. Finally my dad concluded that…
This One’s For You
I suppose this is the part where I have to grab you in and convince you that this is worth reading. Well. I’m not good at that. To be completely honest, this took me years to write and even longer to convince myself that my story was worth even telling. It took a whole lot…
Background
Dear nurses of cardiac pediatric intensive care unit at UCSF, My name is E and I was a patient in August 2009. I underwent open heart surgery to replace my pulmonary valve for tetralogy of Fallot and was taken care of by you on the Parnassus campus. I’m writing to you because I’m currently about…
One Handed BAB 