Personal Narrative: A Career As A Nurse

As I was growing up in Utah, I had a fascination of becoming a nurse that wore a white hat and helped in surgery like the characters in the hit T.V. show M*A*S*H*. I was fascinated with their abilities to help the wounded in the Korean War. I would stay up past our household’s normal bed time hour of 9 P.M. to watch the half hour episode with my mom about 2-3 times a week. Not only was the thought of becoming a nurse so appealing, but the thought of being in a foreign country during a war, helping people who were hurt, was very compelling to me. Mary T. Sarnecky, Ph.D, stated that over the three year course of the U.S.A.s involvement in the war, 1950-1953, the number of Army Nurse Corps officers involved in the action of the Korean War estimated

Although many nurses were drafted into the war, there were others who volunteered for the experience. (Sarnecky, 2010). There are many places around the world that nurses could travel too. But if a nurse is not wanting to travel great distances to find variety, or circumstances are such with family and finances hinder such adventures, many different specialties are available locally. In the resource article from Villanova University, titled Nursing Specialties and Careers (NSAC, 2010) it lists a variety of fields that nurses could work in, many that I am already familiar with such as medical/surgical or emergency and trauma in the hospital setting. Others include hospice nursing in the home health setting and long term facilities, a.k.a, nursing homes. The ones that struck my interest in this article were the ones that involved the skills of nursing in unique settings. One of the interesting ones that this article referred to was listed as forensic nursing. It explained that the role of the nurse was to care for and treat victims of crimes and after they “attend to the immediate (medical) needs”, these nurses collect evidence to be used in the legal system and in the court rooms. The international association of forensic nurses explains it as “the practice of nursing ...when health and legal systems intersect. (IAFN, 2015) Joseph Biden, the Vice President of the United States quoted that “Forensic Nurses play an integral role in bridging the gap between law and medicine. They should be in each and every emergency room" (Hammer, 2006, forward) Clinical forensic nursing is different than forensic pathology, which focuses its investigations based on the deceased of a crime. Clinical forensic nursing focuses on the living victims of a trauma to help find justice for them in the legal system. (IAFN, 2015) “Critical time to gather evidence starts between the initial