What am I up to these days anyway?

I started nursing school at the University of Washington last summer, and after nearly a year into it I decided to peace out. I'm taking off in August to live in Bali, Indonesia for 6 weeks as a doula. I will be put up in the ashram across the street from the Bumi Sehat Birthing Center in Ubud, with a cell phone. This means I am on-call for births! Hurray. Then I will head up to Thailand where I will be living for the subsequent 3 months, until the end of December 2008.

Ok, I'm not foolishly bailing on nursing school after I spent years of my life in anticipation and preparation for this journey. While the above exciting adventures are really going to happen, they will be happening via the School of Nursing! I received the Edith Langley Memorial Scholarship for my efforts in women's healthcare and most recently I was awarded one of two 2008 Simpson Global Service Learning Fellowships to pursue an international healthcare exhange experience. My proposal was to serve as a doula in an underserved birthing facility in Southeast Asia. On top of this, my application was selected to join the 2008 fall "Psych & Community health" quarter Thailand study abroad program.

So it is with immense appreciation for the School of Nursing and this amazing array of opportunties that I will be taking off in August--for the rest of the year.  Upon return to Seattle in January of '09 I will be taking the "Childbirth and the Family" unit followed by my final quarter; the senior practicum.  I will complete my honors research project, teach one more year of my Birth Culture course through the University's Comparative History of Ideas department (an awesome class that my doula business partner, Jane Bush and I put together and first held a year ago). Then, I take the NCLEX and *poof* I'm an RN!

Likety split I say! It has absolutely flown by. And I love it. This present quarter I am taking a class called "Foundations in Professional Nursing" and as I sit here at lunch reading the section for today's class I am inspired to write about my experiences thus far. [I just finished the part about blogging... so I thought I'd actually use this blog I have, for the first time, hahah.] This book speaks to the fact that nurse's in the public eye are dichotmously interpreted as the virtuous hand-maiden to the physician vs. the mean ugly (or sometimes naughty) Nurse Ratched stereotypes. Nurses need to speak out about what they do, how patients' lives depend upon quality and expert nursing care and research. We need agency. So here it is.

I intend to speak to what I am doing, and how empowering I think it is to be in this field of healthcare. I will take no more "why don't you become a doctor?" accusations. I am rigorously studying to become a nurse because I love this work, I love the idea of being the one at the bedside, working face to face with my patient population, in healing, in understanding, in physically and emotionally being the one who can help individuals attain health or sometimes, just survive. That's the fundamental role of the professional nurse. This is what I am doing in this career. What an incredibly demanding and simultaneously rewarding position to be in.

Hopefully I will occasionally become inspired/have the time and energy/be motivated by frustration to post more...