My legs itched.

I lifted the leg of my pants to scratch the hell out of my calf. I had gone for a walk outside the night before to try and preserve the zen I had been attempting to harness all day. It was mid-July and I must have forgotten to put on bug spray.

I had entered the testing room determined to slay this thing in 75 questions. Everyone I knew who had taken the test passed in 75 questions and said that, no matter what, you will walk out feeling like you failed. But no, not me. I was going to be different from everyone else. I was going to feel great. I mean, I was even wearing a shirt that said “knowledge is power.” I had this thing in the bag.

But the questions? They were HARD. Like, harder than trying to explain to my parents what a meme is.

I took my frustration out on my legs as I dug what was left of my nails into my skin. 75 questions came and went. When I got to 76 I thought, this HAS to be it. And then the same thing for 77. And 78. And 79. And then 100. Any question now it will shut off, I kept thinking. I just kept going, going, going. 150, 151, 152, 153. By the time I got to question 200, I knew I was in it for the long haul. I was going to answer every single question this beast had to offer.

Over four hours after I sat down to begin, my test shut off after question 265. Once my screen was blank I sat there for five minutes to let what I wouldn’t dare let myself think during the test sink in. I had failed. And if I didn’t fail, I obviously wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, being that it took me 265 questions to convince the NCLEX I was smart enough to be a nurse.

I looked down and my legs and arms were covered in hives. My body must be releasing histamine to fight off what it didn’t know was causing my cortisol levels to increase, I thought. See? I’m smart. So why so many questions? I whined inside my head.

Before I go on, I want to be very, very clear about something. In the grand scheme of life, I know this was just an exam. I understand that I was not waiting on test results that were going to tell me whether or not I had a terminal disease. And believe me, I know how blessed I am to have never experienced that kind of fear. All I can tell you is that all of my self-worth was riding on whether or not I passed this test. Rational? No, probably not. But neither am I.

I made it all the way to my car and managed to get my seatbelt on before I started crying like a second-grader who just found out Santa isn’t real. I powered my phone back on to find a slew of “good luck!” texts come through and I wanted to vomit. How was I going to tell all my friends and family that I failed this thing I had spent the last 2.5 years preparing for? I had so many people cheering me on and I was going to disappoint everyone.

The next 48 hours I spent waiting for my results were torture. I can’t tell you how to get through them, but I can tell you how I did. I can tell you that I spent an embarrassing number of hours watching Friends and New Girl. I can tell you that I went through several pints of Halo Top (and didn’t even have to feel guilty about it – score!). I can tell you that I went for a destination-less drive, rolled down all my windows, and sang every Taylor Swift song at the top of my lungs until I could no longer hear my own self-deprecating thoughts.

Here is the point I want to drive home: I managed to stay relatively calm throughout the four-plus hours of this exam. I thoroughly read each question and every answer choice and went with the best option. I thought that passing in 75 questions was going to make me a good nurse but I have never been more wrong about anything.

You know what part about this NCLEX experience makes me a good nurse? The fact that I was able to adapt to an unanticipated change in the scenario and act accordingly. The fact that I was able to carry on in a high-stress situation (despite the hives – but what’s a little itching on your lower extremities, eh?). Yes, I have OCD. Yes, I am semi-Type A. And yes, the fact that this didn’t go according to my plan really pissed me off. But guess what? Situations in the hospital rarely go according to plan and to be a good nurse, you have to know that and go with it.

I know there are other students and aspiring nurses out there in similar situations like mine and I want you to know this: the number of questions you have to answer on NCLEX do not denote whether you failed or passed and it certainly does not determine what type of nurse you are going to be. Do you understand that? Read it again. Read it as many times as you have to, and please, know that it is true.

Oh, and by the way, I passed.

Sincerely,

Alexa, RN

 

 

The ventilator sounded like a pinball machine.

It was an odd sound, really, to hear in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. The sudden-ness of it startled me from my semi-conscious state. I had been curled up in a guest chair in the corner of the room holding on to last week’s copy of People magazine.

“Hey Danny,” I had said earlier, “do you want to hear about Taylor Swift or Jennifer Aniston?” My hope was that if I annoyed him enough, he would wake up and tell me to stop.

I got up and poked my head into the hall to see Christine, Danny’s night nurse, charting at the computer.

“That machine,” I groggily said, “is going off again.” I had asked her about it earlier.  It was a funny sound. It made me think that maybe it sounded that way so visitors didn’t immediately panic, thinking something had gone awry. But any sound coming from the machines hooked up to my comatose cousin jolted what was left of my nerves.

Christine followed me back in, telling me, once again, that the noise meant he needed to be suctioned, not that he was crashing like I pessimistically thought.

I resumed my position in the chair next to Danny’s bed and looked up at the clock. It was 2:30am. The SICU was the last place I ever expected to be at this hour on a Friday night.

I sighed and let the time sink in before I closed my eyes again. At this time, just one week earlier, the accident had already happened. I hadn’t known yet. I was sleeping, completely unaware that my dad was about to answer a phone call that would change everything.

On April 19, 2014, my older cousin was critically injured when a drunk driver drove into the back of his police vehicle. He suffered several life-threatening injuries including a traumatic brain injury, multiple skull fractures, a collapsed lung, two broken vertebrae, and broken ribs.

The doctors didn’t know if he would live through the first 24 hours. In fact, he wasn’t supposed to. But despite the severity of his injuries, despite the warnings that a happy ending might not be ahead, despite the doctors’ prognosis that in order to survive he needed “a miracle and a lot of luck,” he pulled through.

At the time, we all thought that if we could just get through that first day we might be in the clear. We had no idea what the journey that lay ahead was going to entail.

Over the next 47 days that my cousin spent in the SICU, my family gathered there every day. It seems surreal, when I think about it now, the routine that we all had adopted. After the initial shock of the accident when many of us had to go back to work, we would still all gather in the hospital waiting room in the evenings and on the weekends. It started to feel like a haven to me. It was the one place where I could go where I knew everyone felt as crappy as I did.

During this time, I was able to tether together the medical lingo I overheard. I spent night after sleepless night up in bed, Googling every word so that I could understand what was happening to him. I read scholarly article after scholarly article on traumatic brain injuries as fiercely as I have read New York Times best-selling novels. I had discovered this unquenchable thirst for knowledge that I hadn’t known was lying dormant inside of me.

Then one day, when I walked into Danny’s room, those numbers and lines on his monitor weren’t just numbers and lines anymore. I saw that his blood pressure was still too high without having to ask his nurse. I knew that his intracranial pressure was also incredibly too high, and moreover, I understood what intracranial pressure was. I was learning. That thirst was awakened now, and inside of me I could feel it screaming more, more, more.

Meanwhile, Danny had become famous. His picture kept gracing the covers of local newspapers and morning news shows, encouraging Facebook statuses and Instagram posts. But to me, he was still just the person I called the night before my high school graduation because I had gotten into a fight with my boyfriend. He was the one who wouldn’t let me drive to our grandmother’s wake when I had just gotten my driver’s permit weeks before because he (half-jokingly) said that one death in the family at the moment was enough. He was the person who mocked the way I held my knife and fork during every single meal we ate together because, according to him, I looked like a Neanderthal. He was the person who teased and antagonized me at any opportunity and I loved him for it.

He wasn’t just this famous cop who was battling for his life. He was my family. And to his SICU nurses, he was a father, a husband, a son, a brother, a nephew, an uncle, a cousin, and a friend. They saw the person he was beyond what the news had said about him because they listened to the stories we told about him. They held our hands while we cried. They hugged us when we arrived and left. They had therapy sessions with us when we were running out of hope. They became our family, too.

Though I hadn’t mentioned it right away, it was early after the accident that I had figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I want to take care of two kinds of people: those who are sick and injured, as well as their families – not because Danny survived, but because so many people don’t.

I used to live my life by the saying, “everything happens for a reason.” I still try to. Some days are harder than others. It’s hard to believe there’s a purpose when bad things happen to good people and the worst people in the world often float through unscathed.

It bothers me. It hurts my heart and soul in a way I didn’t know was possible. But I found the way to get through it.

I want to help save those that I can, and do everything possible to try and save those who cannot. I want to give hugs to grieving and mourning families. I want to tell them jokes to help them through the day. I want to hold patients’ hands as they go through the worst times of their lives.

And that’s why this entire experience has led me to devote my life to care for others as a nurse.