Transition from the Assembly Line
As a child, she wished she could help sick people get better but her divorced parents both worked in manual labor and college was not even a distant plan. So, she worked for 13 years on a factory assembly line until presented with an unexpected opportunity to work hard in a different way to fulfill her childhood dream.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
RC was born into an African American family, the second oldest of 4 children. Her father was a manual laborer in a paper mill, later becoming a truck driver. Her mother had worked in food preparation within a commercial kitchen before taking time off to raise her children and later working in food service at a bar.
College was never a topic of discussion at home.
CHILDHOOD
Despite the lack of nursing role models within her family or their adult friends, RC recalls – picturing herself as early as age 5 – always dressing up as a nurse for Halloween. Although her parents could not afford to outfit her in an all-white dress, RC would identify herself at each Halloween host’s door as a nurse and proudly point to her ‘nurse’s bag’ which carried a bottle of candy ‘pills’.
Although college was not on any of the 4 siblings’ education horizon, their parents told them that if they stayed out of trouble, they could probably get a job after high school at one of the local, commercial employers which needed lots of employees for factory assembly line work.
EDUCATION – PART ONE
RC was an ‘average’ student throughout her public-school years, working hard enough to earn passing grades. She was comfortable in math classes, including algebra and geometry, but never tried to push herself into advanced math classes such as calculus and trigonometry. She enjoyed chemistry and thus did well in that class.
During summer school vacations, RC volunteered as a ‘Candy Striper’ within the county’s largest hospital, where she brought food to patients, most of whom were in bed, so she also filled their water bottles. Only nurses could touch the patients and get involved with medications, but RC was glad to see nurses in action and was never upset by seeing blood or patients in severe distress.
The large hospital served mostly White patients, cared for by a virtually all White medical staff of physicians and nurses. RC was aware of a smaller hospital nearby, known as ‘The Black Hospital’ because it served primarily Black patients. RC cannot now recall why she was permitted to wander the halls of this smaller hospital – perhaps she was visiting someone? – often looking through the small glass window in each patient’s hallway door, to see the sick, bedridden people, while wishing she could help get them better.
But for the career path ahead, RC saw no possibility to extend her education required for nursing. With a factory job arranged by her father – now divorced from her mother – to start within several weeks of her high school graduation, RC began her assembly line career, from which she assumed she would probably eventually retire when eligible to collect Social Security in her 60s.
FIRST ADULT JOB IS NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
If the large commercial business had not decided to close its local factory, RC probably would have remained an assembly line worker for several decades. But after she had been assembling component parts for 13 years, the factory owners notified each worker that the factory was relocating to a southern state, so each worker had to make a choice among three options:
(1) move south and continue working on the assembly line with the same employer; or
(2) participate in a program which would pay a large portion of education expenses to learn something for a new career; or
(3) find any different job with any different employer.
RC saw option (2) as her opportunity to start a new career involving her earliest childhood interest: helping to make sick people feel better through her caring efforts as a nurse.
EDUCATION – PART TWO – TAKING ADVANTAGE OF FREE OFFER
The local, entry-level nursing school where RC hoped to enroll was qualified to receive the tuition payments provided for ‘displaced workers’ by the combination of her factory employer and the government. RC was accepted as a nursing student, eventually earning a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree from a local university. Although the employer-related tuition (and books) assistance did not cover the total costs to obtain her BSN, RC qualified for further scholarship assistance because by then, she was the unmarried mother of two children.
RC’s student nursing program was like all other nursing programs even today: a combination of classroom work plus a rotation of ‘clinical’ work – observing and assisting while under professional supervision – in different nurse settings ranging from medical offices to hospitals, including exposure to multiple types of nursing practices: medical / surgical; obstetrics (labor and delivery); pediatrics (children) and behavioral health.
CHALLENGE – PUSHING YOUR LIFE AHEAD AS AN UNWED MOTHER
As RC’s story will demonstrate – and as RC now advises many teenage girls with the same circumstances – having a baby at a young age without a father to share the burdens and joys of raising children – does not doom either your life or your future career plans. You may have to delay your plans temporarily and you may lose some sleep but – by yourself or with some advice and with or without aid from family and friends – you’ll be able to find a path to raise your child / children and at the same time, get on with your adult life.
While a mother without a partner (married or unmarried, male, or female) may be able to carry on with her working life and her family life by herself, both responsibilities – working and mothering – are more reasonably accomplished with help from others. For RC, help was provided from several sources: childcare by the aunt who had raised her and by her ‘bonus mom” – a friend from her days on the factory assembly line. And also from her father as a constant cheerleader for RC’s efforts.
Supplementing the childcare and cheerleading, RC kept working, full-time, as the sole wage earner to provide money for the essentials: rent, food, clothing, transportation, and medical care as needed.
CHALLENGE – NO ONE OR VERY FEW OTHERS HERE LOOK LIKE ME
RC was the only African American female within her group of nursing school students who would eventually need to pass the state licensing exam. But she was not deterred about being different – she would study hard in each class to learn what she needed to know so being a ‘person of color’ would not be a factor in her career success.
TAKING THE NURSE LICENSING EXAM MAY BE SCARY
(Editor’s note – Any time you are required to pass a test to continue your career – although you have already graduated from high school and then from a 2 to 4-year, specialized education program – like earning a BSN – it is understandable to be nervous about having to pass one final licensing test. But while earning your graduate degree provided base knowledge for your future career work plus your extra studying for the licensing exam won’t remove some test anxiety, your preparation will cause “your butterflies to fly in formation” – so once you see that you have a good answer for the first exam question, then a good answer for the second exam question and so on, your early butterflies will fly away and your base knowledge plus test preparation will have served you well.)
RC was nervous at the start of the licensing exam, which consisted of up to 250 questions to determine whether she would be qualified to work with physicians in various medical situations, to help patients get better. When her computer shut down after she answered the first 75 questions, she thought “Either I did really well so I don’t have to answer any more questions or……….. I did really badly and will have to try again.”
After a long, stressful lunch recess, RC learned that she had passed her nurse licensing test on her first try!
VARIED JOBS WITHIN NURSING CAREER
RC’s first job was in a medical office, assisting an ENT (ear, nose and throat) physician specialist. About a year later, she met an African American physician whose ‘internal medicine’ practice was informally known as a ‘family doctor’ practice. He was looking for nursing assistance so RC was glad to be a new employee, taking and recording a patient’s vital signs (temperature, height, weight, blood pressure) and while helping out in the exam room, writing the doctor’s prescription on a notepad for the dr. to sign and the patient to take with them, while RC recorded important developments within the patient’s file (a paper file before use of computerized files was widespread).
After taking time off to get married and be more involved with her children, RC worked at a nursing home, where most patients were confined to bed. There, RC’s duties included providing physician-directed medications either orally (patient swallowing by mouth) or by inserting intravenous tubes (IVs) into the patient’s arm.
Always looking for a new opportunity to work in a more interesting nursing job for better pay, RC signed on to work at a large hospital, within their ‘weekend program’ – on duty for 3 weekends each month but paid as if worked as a nurse that fourth week. An additional benefit was the hospital paying RC’s tuition expenses while she took evening classes to earn her Bachelor’s degree – cum laude (Latin for “with praise”).
A different reason for her next job change was to take time off to care for her children who were not yet old enough to be in school most of the day. But as soon as they were enrolled in all-day public school, RC commenced her next job as a bedside nurse within a Veterans Administration (VA) hospital. She started with typical nursing tasks: monitoring patients’ vital signs and proper medications, inserting IVs for blood transfusions, hanging, and monitoring drip medications and offering words of encouragement to both patients and their families.
NURSE EDUCATOR
After a decade of bedside nursing, RC had earned the respect of the hospital management, who offered a ‘dual position’ of continuing basic nursing plus teaching the medical administration process to new nurses and physicians who were not full-time VA employees – the use of the VA’s medication software to ensure patients were receiving the proper medications: confirming the medication ID plus its timing and reporting any non-compliance. RC became entrusted with authority to question if a physician’s prescription note was in error, and if so, she would request the dr. to correct the error (in writing) and then RC would revise the patient’s medical record accordingly – a huge responsibility!
While performing her duties as a Nurse Educator, RC returned to the same university’s graduate program and earned her Master’s degree in Nursing Education – with Honors!
(Editor: Note RC’s academic progression from ‘average’ high school student to Bachelor’s degree cum laude, then Master’s degree with honors. These honors’ recognitions by two different graduate school faculties are what can be achieved when a student finds a career so interesting that she or he pushes ahead to learn as much as possible to perform their career responsibilities as well as possible.
Lesson demonstrated: Average high school performance need not be a predictor of the level of future academic performance. That same principle may be applied as any student journeys from middle school through high school; thus, doing poorly in 9th grade doesn’t mean below-average grades need to be repeated going forward. Instead, entering the next grade level is the opportunity to prove to yourself, your teachers, and your family (those lucky enough to have at least one caring relative) that you have the intelligence and dedication to make a successful change. Making such a change will give you confidence to continue meeting challenges through each grade and into your adult career.)
CHALLENGE – ADVOCACY TO DETER RACISM
(Editor’s note – The Veteran’s Administration, an agency of the federal government, is managed by people just like any other business, large or small. And because some people in management continue to (unlawfully and immorally) discriminate against others for various reasons including ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, race or religion, employees have the legal right to complain to management – and file a court claim – without concern about termination (being ‘fired’) for having made the complaint.)
Since RC’s nursing experience and personal judgment were respected by both managers and fellow employees, she was appointed to be Program Manager at the VA Hospital’s program for monitoring and resolving complaints of discrimination, which usually arose not by direct insults, but by apparently improper decisions in the promotion process. RC had the authority to review the anonymous (no names) records of promotions including the ethnicity of anyone involved in a complaint of discrimination. RC would then ask any manager to explain their promotion decision before advising the highest level of management of RC’s findings and recommendations.
CAREER SATISFACTION
During RC’s nursing career within many different settings – physician offices, nursing homes, private and government hospitals – she fulfilled her childhood dream to help people get better – or at least be as comfortable as possible if getting better was not possible.
In addition to basic nursing care, RC appreciated being trusted to educate nurses and physicians regarding the best practices for patient medications.
Finally, RC was glad to make fellow employees “get better” by listening to their concerns and advocating that they be fairly treated.
