Dreams That Sort of Came True by Patty Blount

 As I write this, what’s left of the Department of Education just reclassified a bunch of degree programs as not professional- nursing included. 

Since the age of 10, I’d planned to be a nurse. Labor and Delivery or pediatrics, specifically. Throughout school, I studied biology and other sciences, took all the first aid courses I could, even won a scholarship to college. 

In my first year, it was great. I loved my classes and all that I was learning. My second year, however, Was a tragedy. 

My class was assigned to a geriatric ward where every patient I had died. That was an emotionally draining experience for which I was not prepared. Even worse than that was the fact that it seemed as if every doctor with whom I worked was a caricature of a complete and total jerk  that you would see on a TV show. One was looking for a patient’s chart I happen to see it sitting in the lounge. I told him that that was where he could find it, and he ordered me to deliver it to him - so here I was trying to deal with my complex emotions, dealing with deaths for which I was never prepared and now being treated like a servant.  Ironic how the government has decided this is not a professional career any longer.

I spoke to my instructors , asked them for advice on dealing with my emotions and sadly one of my advisors laughed at me and said if I couldn’t handle this, I would never be cut out for pediatrics.

This was a sad moment in my life I had planned for years to become a nurse and now I hated it. I hated every second of it. I made the difficult decision to quit and find a new career. I’d always wanted to become an author because reading was my favorite hobby but I had no good ideas. I felt like all the good ideas had already been written so I treated it as a hobby and never got serious about it until my 40s when my debut novel Send was published. I finally realized it doesn’t matter if the story is an original what matters is my spin on it is . I’m happy to report that I now have over a dozen novels published and I’m still writing although very slowly.

Many of you know I suffer from a chronic autoimmune disease. I’m actually using dictation software to write this blog post because my hands hurt so apologies in advance if any of the words are incorrect, and I didn’t notice them during my editing.

So in a sense, even though nursing did not work out for me, I still did achieve my other dream of becoming an author.

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What was your dream job? How close are you to making it real? Sometimes we have to get out of our own ways to make those dreams come true we have to stop treating them as someday or what if situation and make them real concrete plans that we take steps to achieve.