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How To Deal With Death & Dying as a Nursing Student
Ok, we aren’t all me (alright, that was a dumb statement). We didn’t all get into nursing to work in palliative care. But regardless of what area you end up working in as a nurse, you will encounter death and dying. So how can you handle it as a student? Not everyone is as comfortable with death as I am. Actually, the vast majority of people probably are not as comfortable with death as I am. Let’s say you are part of the 99.9% of society that has a hard time talking about, thinking about or emotionally dealing with death: how do you deal when it is a very real…
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How To Pray Before Starting a Clinical Day
Folks, I am so excited to announce that I am going to be working for a local University in the fall as a clinical educator! I am also going to be working in the simulation lab for an intensive palliative care course. I can’t wait to get back to being with students, which has to be my favourite part of nursing. So, in light of this, I was thinking back to my student nurse days and how I used to prepare for the start of my clinical day. This almost always included prayer. Here are a few prayers you can pray before you start your clinical day: The Lord’s Prayer…
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Dear Nursing (A Love Letter)
Dear Nursing, Why you gotta be like this? I kid. I love you. But you are hard and you make me crazy. I have tried in earnest to quit you because I thought that is what was best. I genuinely believe that God asked me to lay you down and walk away. I prayed and prayed that He would let me take you back because surely we are meant to be together. But sadly, thats not the case. Don’t get me wrong. I have a job. Two new jobs, in fact. In nursing! I’m going to be working shifts and learning new skills and walking with people through their health…
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Why I Am A Christian
It occurred to me that maybe some of you don’t know why I am a Christian. Some of you may not even know all that much about Christianity or why I would choose to get up early on a Sunday and spend 2 hours sitting in a pew. So rather than just jumping in to more things I suck at I thought I would backup and talk about how I got here. As most of you know, my dad is an Anglican Priest so I basically grew up at the church. I was homeschooled until High School so almost all of my friends were from church, I would go to…
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Things I Suck At: Dreaming
Now, this kind of feels disingenuous because let me tell you, as an enneagram 4 I have ZERO problems with dreaming. I can get very lost in dreams and ideas and creativity. So much so that to stop my brain from spinning I usually have to write out all my ideas and dreams into some kind of chart with specific strategies on how to accomplish them, lest I go insane. But when it comes to actually listening to dreams, being in tune with the Father and what He wants to accomplish through our dreams, I’m not very good. A lot of it comes from what I think is something we’ve…
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Things I Suck At: Purpose
I mentioned in another post that I have been really focused on purpose lately. I’ve felt completely restless and like I was being called to something, with zero clue as to what that something could be. So I started seeking out Christian resources on purpose in an attempt to maybe once and for all figure myself out. I started off with Annie F. Down’s 100 Days to Brave which is, you guessed it, a 100 day devotional. It was great and I recommend it, but it didn’t quite go deep enough. It did have some really great insights like listening to ideas that pop into your head because those ideas…
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Things I Suck At: A Journey
So this whole trying-to-figure-myself-and-my-God-out thing has been a long time coming. In fact, I think it started in the fall of 2017 when I started to have a pretty strong hunch that the baby I was growing was going to be of the female variety. I came to this conclusion after months of feeling the worst I have ever felt while pregnant. I was tired and nauseous all the time. I ate approximately 5 apples a day because it was all I wanted to eat and I couldn’t drink water because it was too “thin.” Milkshakes? They were fine. Life sustaining water? Hard pass. My two other pregnancies were good,…
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I’m Quitting Nursing.
Lately I’ve been really focused on purpose. How does what we do here on earth work towards God’s kingdom? How am I going to spend these short days that I have here, pursuing God’s glory? In this search, I started reading the book Made for This by Jennie Allen. One of the things Allen talks about is laying everything before the Lord, and being willing to follow Him anywhere. I felt so confident that I had done this. Over and over again I offered prayers of thanksgiving and devotion where I would say “I will go wherever you lead me Lord, everything I have is yours” and then in the…
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Nursing and The Name III: Gossip
Here is the thing about nursing: I recently called it a beautiful disaster of a career. It was just something that came to me, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it to be true. Nurses can get really bogged down with the day to day. From working shifts, to bullying, to mental health issues, there is no shortage of challenges that nurses face just to come to work, let alone deal with the complex health needs of their patients. But some of the big problems that come up aren’t the result of the work, but of human brokenness. Man, can you see that brokenness in…
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New Year, Same God
It is a brand new year, and you know what that means! We all have a renewed sense of self and are ready to take on new adventures, fully confident in who we are and what we have become! …..of course I’m kidding. Most likely, we have all decided that this will finally be our year. We are going to make real changes this time. It’s allllllll going to be different. Here is the thing about different. It’s not always good. Before you start listing all the ways in which you need to change to meet the new year, take a minute to list out the gifts and talents that…