Sharing my other passion. :) My personal statement for grad school:
Healing Hearts
When I was in elementary school, my sister and I would go to my father's clinic after he had seen all his patients. Growing up, I have seen the work that he does as a physician and always told myself that I wanted to grow up just like him. I played with his black stethoscope, putting them on my ears, usually the wrong way and pretending to hear my sister's heartbeat. At that time, she was diagnosed with a condition where a valve in her heart was not working properly. "Lub, dub, dub," the sound resonated to my ear as I place the bell of the stethoscope at the left side of my sister's chest. With that one simple gesture, I would assume that I made my sister feel better. After some trips to the hospital with her when I was nine, paired with bottles of medications she had to take, I knew that my simple gesture was not even close to heal her sickness. I wanted to show her that I cared, so I decided to give her all the love I can give thinking that it might be the one cure to heal her broken heart.
A professor in anatomy when I was in college said that the heart has two parts: the one that loves and the one that pumps. If you're going to spend the rest of your life fixing broken hearts, you might as well learn how to fix both parts because you can't fix one without the concern for the other. I worked in the medical field for this reason. I became a critical care nurse three years ago and worked in a county trauma hospital serving the underprivileged, high acuity population. I had the challenge of being compassionate for patients who have little to no resources to buy antibiotics or pay for surgery; who have been abandoned by their relatives; and who have yet to accept the terminal nature of their diseases. I got little to no sleep on most days. Although very exhausted after a long 12-hour shift, I was content and happy.
One particular night, I had a very sick patient. I walked in to our unit with the sight of a massive blood transfusion machine in Room 26, the room of the patient I was assigned to care for that night. My patient had been bleeding from an unknown source and had been taken to surgery three times already. As I was doing my assessment, I noticed on the monitor that his arterial line had a flat waveform. I checked it and felt that he didn't have a pulse. "Code Blue!" I yelled. I immediately started chest compression, and as I was looking onto his face, I whispered, "Please, don't give up!"
After 20 minutes trying to resuscitate the patient, blood stains on the white linen sheets, a half inch thick paperwork for the blood transfusions and medications, we got his heart to beat again. After stabilizing him, I took him to the cath lab where the doctors discovered a rupture in his lumbar artery. They embolized it and took him back to the ICU. That night, I worked hard to keep him alive until the next shift. Couple of months later, I walked by Room 26 and saw him sitting on a cardiac chair with his mother at bedside. He was off of the breathing machine and although unable to talk because of his tracheostomy, he had that gleaming look in his eyes that said "Thank you for saving my life." That moment is one of those moments when I realized that this really is my passion. Medicine, as I have always imagined it, is something that alleviates pain, cures sickness, saves lives, and overall just makes the lives of many people better: I want to be a part of that.
Being a nurse lets me take part of the ever changing health system. The years I have spent working in a hospital with direct patient care and evidence based-practice have prepared me to succeed in this field. Nursing has showed me the importance of therapeutic communication and the difference that an encouraging smile or helping hand can make in healing patients. In addition to that, I have also learned that knowledge and being current with the best practices can result to better patient outcomes. I would like to advance my career because I want to expand my role as a nurse. I want to be able to do more for my patients especially the underserved and vulnerable population. Being a nurse practitioner will provide me a better understanding of the science of nursing and will give me the professional means to diagnose, prescribe, and overall manage the care of patients from all walks of life.
I am ecstatic that a chance to make a difference in someone's life by playing a new role in this field has finally come. Advancing my career is something that I have always desired. I want to heal broken hearts better and of course, better the life of many people through health care. For the past years that I have engaged in the medical field, from my sister who had a heart disease, to the patients I care for every night including my patient in Room 26, I have learned that love alone nor stethoscope alone is enough to heal a broken heart. I am excited and eagerly awaiting for the chance to continue to practice and learn both and more.
