Isiah

"To be a nurse, you need to have a certain level of empathy."

By Students of NYC

November 18^th, 2023

"Nursing broke down how I thought and quite literally reshaped my mind. Now, as a senior, and after all of the knowledge this program has given me, I can walk down the street and everything looks different. You see things that you would never see before. I’ll be like, oh, this person, they probably have diabetes. Oh, this person, they have myasthenia gravis. Or this person has osteoporosis, he has kyphosis, his posture is off. It has opened my eyes. It's really fascinating. I feel like before being in the program, I was blind my whole life.

Before being in the nursing program at Clara Barton, I never really felt challenged by school. It came easy for me. I just did whatever my teacher told me to do. I didn’t even really do homework. Homework was supposed to be a way to reinforce what we learned in school, but I had straight A's. Now, it's a completely different ball game. I've learned what it means to be challenged. To be a nurse, you need to have a certain level of empathy, and you need to have a certain level of critical thinking. Expansive and creative thinking. It kind of combines all of that together.

During my junior year, we created our own hypothetical patient, and most of my classmates for my year come from a Haitian-American background, so we named our client Mary Jean Baptiste. We actually don't call them patients, we call them clients — because the word patient can be demeaning in a sense to some people. It could make them feel weak. Throughout the year we gave Mary Jean a million different types of diseases. She had diabetes, she had hypertension, she had a stroke one time, she had a myocardial infarction, she had atherosclerosis. Literally, every disease that we worked on, we gave to this poor lady. We created Mary Jean Baptiste’s husband, named Henry, I believe. We created a whole hypothetical family. These people don't exist. But I feel like Dr. Edmond having us create these characters really helped me learn. The textbook is not the same as life, because no two people are the same. I just find that so fascinating, and that's the wonderful thing about nursing and medicine. There's always something new.

I spent my spare time during COVID learning whatever I could. I got into stocks. I got into politics. I got into bonds and mutual funds. I've learned microbiology and different current events. That’s one thing about me. I love to learn. I also like learning people. Why do people think certain ways? Make certain gestures? Some people talk with their hands and some people put pauses to emphasize different words. Even speech is something that I love learning, because that's something I would describe as a skill of mine. I've been practicing not to use ums in between my sentences. When I take pauses ... it sounds a lot better.

But COVID was not easy; a lot of my family members were frontline workers in that. There was a lot of isolation. I didn't really get to see my mom. Around that time, I didn't like myself. I feel like ‘hate’ could also describe how I felt. I didn't like how I looked. I didn't like how I spoke. I didn’t like the way I thought. I didn't like my habits. Very simple, miniscule things. I didn’t like how I breathed air. I was constantly running away from who I am. But I'm a cognitive thinker. I would describe myself as very cerebral, which means I prioritize the logical aspect of things before my emotions. So eventually, I made a choice. I started going to the gym and working out. I started putting more effort into my school. For sophomore and junior year, my average never dropped below a 90. I started connecting back with my family and learning how to be human again.

I feel like from then to now, my mindset has been this one word: kaizen. K-A-I-Z-E-N. It's of Japanese origin, and the term stands for constant improvement. And that's essentially my goal, my mindset, my motto. Constant improvement: being better than I was yesterday. When I don't do well on an assessment, a quiz or a test, I look at my study habits. What did I study that week? Was I out with friends? Was I just not performing well? Did I not ask enough questions? I figure out what needs improvement and improve based on that and better my score. So that's really my mindset: Just be better. Just be better. Be better.