What a day!

Today I passed the Family Nurse Practitioner board exam. Yay! I always knew I wanted to be a nurse practitioner but getting to this point was a crazy long process!

It all started with Nursing School....Hate is a strong word, but I STRONGLY disliked nursing school. Nursing school was so terribly painful for me! If you really know me well, you'd know that I don't like hospitals.

From day one, I knew I wanted to work as a nurse practitioner in primary care (an office). Well, in nursing school, your future goals don't matter much. The bottom line is you are going to learn how to be a well rounded RN. That means spending time in MedSurg, L&D, ICU, Emergency, Psych/Mental Health...etc. That was great news for the 49 other people in my program, but it was torture for me. I even had a nursing professor tell me I should change my major, that I shouldn't be a nurse!

It's not that I wasn't meant to be a nurse, nurses can work in a ton of different settings. Hospitals just are not my cup of tea, they cause me serious anxiety, I like to avoid them at all costs! I guess it's no surprise that I LOVE primary care, the whole purpose is to keep people OUT of hospitals (coincidence? I don't think so!).

The other major challenge was studying on the road. During the course of my masters program we moved FIVE times. That means 5 different preceptors (I actually had way more than 5). Every time we moved I had to find a new preceptor (some one to mentor me for the clinical portion of my school requirements).

Oh the joy of opening the phone book and randomly calling doctors and nurse practitioners I'd never met and asking them if I could intern at their practice. I could almost hear their thoughts through the silent phone line, "who is this person and why is she calling me???" I can't tell you how many times I was hung up on....HUNDREDS.

I'd like to give a quick shout out to the people who did NOT hang up on me...Dr. Robertson, Dr. Ellman, Dr. Hamidi, Kelly Schauer, Ellen Gastauer, Dr. Borucki, Katheryn Green, Dr. Smith, Dr. Price and Dr. Noorani...Thank you all for being the most wonderful preceptors I could have every asked for! Without these amazingly kind and generous people I would not be here :)

In the end, 7 years of education was all worth it because I love this job:)

P.S. I saw that nursing professor that told me I shouldn't be a nurse at my FNP graduation, and I made it a point to give her a big HELLO! The look on her face was priceless....she definitely remembered me.