Throughout the course of the week I've had three chances to work with either Dr. Lauri or Dr. Richard. This has been my first experience working with doctors closely and it's such an excellent base to what I'll be eventually be doing every day. I had two takeaways from my experiences this week. The first is how connected nursing and medicine are. When I tell people that I want to be a nurse, every once in a while I get a person who asks "Why don't you just become a doctor?" and for me this kind of question always stems from a misunderstanding of the profession. People either don't know or forget that the basics of nursing and medicine are the same, we are all building off of the same foundation. The importance of a health history, the necessity of knowing how drugs act in the body, being able to ask questions to elicit a complete response, all the beautiful detective work, it's all the same. What we do with the information is different, but we're all working off the same base.
My second takeaway is something that I've only felt on service trips in the past. There's always this sense of renewal, of coming to know what actually matters. When you work with people who don't have access to things we take for granted, it puts things in perspective. At home it's so easy to get caught up in all the problems we seem to have, failing tests, losing things, issues with friends and family, and day to day it seems like these things are important and large. But when you're away from it all and learning from people who's problems are how they're going to feed their children or how they're going to get their life-saving medication, it makes what's going on at home fit on the head of a pin. I love that part about service trips, day by day it feels like shedding old skin and stepping into a new one, with more knowledge and a better understanding of the world than before.
Farwa Fatima A. Sheriff
Xavier University 2017
Bachelors of Science in Nursing
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