$300, 000 , anyone?

THIS IS AN ARTICLE THAT GOT PUBLISHED AT PHIL. DAILY INQUIRER - YOUNGBLOOD LAST YEAR....;P yes, i am a nurse!

I FINISHED college the other Saturday. I was swarmed with messages saying “congratulations” or “I’m so proud of you.” Some friends just shook my hand and, as if they had nothing else to say, just asked me, “So how does it feel to finally graduate?” I answered them with a smile and said, “Oh, it feels great! It’s exciting to know the feeling of being unemployed!”
They thought I was joking, and so they laughed, gave me a pat on back and told me not to worry because I would soon be a registered nurse and go abroad and find greener pastures. They went on to say something about the big salary I would be earning as a nurse and the benefits my family would surely get from it. They also brought up the issue of doctors becoming nurses. And finally, they advised me against getting married or even having a boyfriend until I was abroad.
I have heard so many versions of these for four years now. This thing about instant wealth was used by my parents to convince me to go into nursing. To someone who repeats this, it might look as if I am hearing it for the first time, I am really fed up and I feel like finishing their statements. It is only because I don’t want to sound disrespectful that I put up this façade, an art that I have mastered after many years of listening and listening to the same thing. Sometimes, I just want to make a list of the salaries nurses are supposed to earn in different countries and the types of cars they can expect to own as well as the different nationalities of their probable spouses. This would help those who are trying to help me decide. Perhaps then, they won’t make a mistake in telling me in which country I would earn $300,000 a year.
It’s amazing how people who didn’t take up nursing can be very interested in a nurse’s salary. Once they have an idea of the amount, they announce it to the whole world to convince others to take up the course. My grandmother’s friends, my mother’s officemates and even our high school registrar told me many stories about nurses and always concluded that I should not think twice about going into nursing.
But did they ever consider what I have to go through before I would enjoy the so-called greener pastures? Did they know how many bacteria and viruses will enter my respiratory system before I qualify to work abroad? How many bullets and tumors have to be taken out of human bodies with my assistance? Or how many last breaths I will witness? Don’t they realize how much I have to sacrifice to earn such fabulous salaries, like leaving my family? I bet they don’t, but they pretend that they do.
At a small gathering after our Nursing Ceremony, the one in which they gave us our college rings and pins, there was an old man who talked about nursing so much that he sounded like a brochure. He lectured on the “beauty” of being a nurse, which of course focused on the big salary. He ended his one-and-a-half-hour speech with a big smile and an approving remark: “You made an excellent choice!”
His statement floated in my mind for a long time. It clashed with my idea that choosing nursing was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. It took me days to finally accept that, yes, he was right! But what made nursing an excellent choice for me was not the salary I will get, it was the experience I had as a nursing student.
It was an experience which was way too different from the experiences of students taking other courses. When they got together, they would talk about the low grades they got in their quizzes, the difficulty they encountered studying numbers or the thrill of analyzing chemicals in the laboratory. When I talked about my experience, I talked about the patients I handled. I talked about their condition, their story, their experience. I talked about life!
And that is what makes me different from them. It’s because I deal with life and I have the rare chance of seeing life like the other students never see it. In my world, there is no room for mistakes unlike theirs where they can easily crumple the piece of paper with their wrong answers or make fresh calculations or take make-up quizzes in order to pass a subject. They will never know when a person is in pain by reading books or calculating, but a nurse does.
And this is because a nurse does more than to read and calculate. A nurse produces more than a computer program or a graded thesis. A nurse gives his/her own self to the people around. A nurse gives humane care to people, to life! And I believe that is reason enough for me to accept that, indeed, being a nurse is an excellent choice.
So why don’t some well-meaning people, who are trying to help students make up their minds, just tell them: “Hey! Why don’t you take up nursing so you will have rich experiences that will help you make good judgments in life” or “You should take up nursing because it is a rare opportunity to take care of the most wonderful gift God gave us”? I suppose it is too difficult for them to let these words escape their mouths because people might laugh at them since the words sound so godly, so just, so humane, so good, so true. On the other hand, why do they have to bribe them with the big salary? For practicality’s sake, I know, or perhaps it is just their way of saying, “Go earn big money so you can help me escape from poverty.”
Being a nurse is not just about money. It is about carrying a big responsibility in nurturing the profession as a never-ending fountain of experiences that will make a person appreciate life even more.