I wanted to be a nurse

I used to want to be a nurse.

At the end of my senior year of high school I went on a lake vacation with my best friends (I actually don't remember it too well, but this is what I remember). Nicole's family had a place and a boat so we went. It was beautiful and exciting and fun. I had never really done water sports, so at the end of each day I was exhausted. I actually fell asleep at the dinner table one night. Anyways...on our last day on the lake, we got the tubes out and took turns being flailed around the water. So fun. Nicole and Kyle each had their own tube and were trying to flip each other over. While the boat was stopped, he wrapped the rope from her tube around his hand so he could flip her over. When the boat took off, it tore his finger right off.

He actually spent a few minutes diving around looking for his finger but never found it. But in that moment when he emerged from the water and everyone was frantic and some of my girls couldn't look without wanting to puke, I felt totally in control (with a fair amount of adrenaline). I was able to wrap a towel around his bleeding fingerless hand and hold it there until we got to shore. After that exciting afternoon, I seriously started to consider nursing.

I was already enrolled at APU with my scholarships attained and classes registered. My freshman year of college I went to Los Angeles to be a singer. When I was there I realized that everyone around me had the same dreams that I did, only they were so much closer and skilled to reaching them than i was. So I quickly realized I would never make a career as a singer unless I spent my life teaching private lessons or something - which wasn't at all appealing to me.

So I reanalyzed. My sophomore year I studied nursing in Colorado. I attended Colorado's best nursing school and it was very challenging. I did pretty well and enjoyed it all except for my Anatomy and Physiology lecture (somehow i got A's in the lab and D's in the lecture - both semesters). They informed me that I needed to re-take the class. The Nursing school was a 4  year program and I entered it a year late, so I already was going to be graduating a year later than i wanted to. Let's make it 2 years. I weighed the pros and cons and decided that graduating beside my "little" sister was not what i wanted to do. So I decided to put away my dreams and my practicality and just enjoy school. Just get a degree doing something I absolutely love. And i did that.

Job searching has me thinking about this I guess. Thinking that maybe 2 extra years of school may have been worth it. But I'm not discouraged or anything and I don't think i regret studying Literature - that opened a world of beauty and enjoyment that i continue to relish. I'm just thinking about the effects of life choices and how very impacting they are, when they seemed so simple and minuscule back then.