I interviewed a formal Registered Nurse by the name of Anita Stiens, who is now retired. 

 

How long did you work as an RN?

“ I worked as a Nurse for 50 years”

 

 Why did you decide to work in the medical field? Specifically as an RN

“ At my time women only had a small number of decisions on what to do, either being a teacher or being a nurse. My mother told me that I've always wanted to be a Nurse. I love to help people when they felt sick, I always wanted to help in some way.” 

 

What was the biggest challenge?

“Figuring out who you are and understanding where you fit in in nursing.”

 

What was a daily challenge?

“Waking up at 4:30 in the morning, and being tired but not being able to complain about how tired you were, also being on call, having long ours ranging from 8 hours to 12 hours a day.”  

 

Would you have done anything differently? 

“ I would have continued school, I got married when I finished nursing school but to get a bachelor's degree I only needed to do school for 9 more months, not that I regret getting married but would have continued to learn new skills.”

 

What was the most difficult decision you had to make as an RN?

“Trying to determine which way I wanted to go in the profession, in what specialty I wanted to focus on because there are many ways you could go.”

 

Did you always want to work in the medical field?

“ I always want to do something, I saw myself as a fixer, if I think someone is sick I wanted to fix that, I wanted to know people were okay”

 

What is the most valuable lesson you learned? 

“ You discover who you really are, if you are a good nurse, you have to understand yourself, you have to know who you are and why you react to things a certain way. There are going to be physicians and doctors who believe they're a god or they think they know better than everyone and those people don't know themselves.”

 

What are the pros and cons of working in the medical field?

“ The pros right now is that there are so many jobs that you can choose from that you are bound to find something that suits your personality. The cons are that you have to choose the right area to work and the right people to work with, because of some care only about the money and not much about putting the patient first.”

 

How did you approach risk-taking?

“ Risks happen in any field you work in, there are 2 different kinds of risks one personally that is out of your comfort zone and you want to try something new, for example, I was offered a job at an insurance company and I had to think, do I really want the job? I took the risk and I liked it. Opportunities open up in the medical field, if you don't make the right decision moving back to where you were is difficult. You don't want to burn your bridges because people working for you, you might be working for them in the future.”

 

What skill was the most difficult to learn?

“ I would say in the medical industry it went from bedside nursing to understanding machines and the hardest skill is figuring out how those machines affect the quality of care you are giving the patient. Those machines one day you are working with a specific type of machine and the next morning it could be different. So you have to figure out if my patient is in trouble or if my patient is okay. For me I'm not technically savvy that was hard and figuring out if the patient is okay from a machine versus looking at a patient the machine could be saying that there is something going wrong with the patient but they could look fine.”

 

What was the biggest problem you experienced in the medical field?

 “ Working with people who are only there for profit and don’t care for the patients. They only care about how much they will receive if they do the minimum for the patient. It's frustrating working with and for these people because you care for the patient.”