Nursing Podcast by NURSING.com (NRSNG) (NCLEX® Prep for Nurses and Nursing Students)

Them: "How can we help?"

Me: "I don't know . . ."

This is a conversation I've had countless times over the last year. If only I had some sort of ailment that could be SEEN and FIXED . . . why can't it be a broken arm? A simple cast would "fix" the problem in just a matter of weeks.

With mental health, you read the books, you do the checklists, you take the meds, you attend counseling . . . but at any moment . . . around any corner . . . there it is - ready to crush your hope and happiness.

Each time you start a new medication you feel hopeful . . . "this time it will work"

And each time a new medication doesn't help, you feel a bit more hopeless . . . "maybe I am beyond repair"

They say mental health is a battle. It is.

And for many of us it is a lifelong battle.

And worse still, it is a silent battle - no one can SEE what you are going through.

And the worst part is that you begin to convince yourself that it has to be silent - that you shouldn't share your struggle - that perhaps you are "beyond repair" - that others will judge.

Get NCLEX Flash Notes here: https://nclexbook.com

I know just as well as any other nursing student - nursing school is freaking EXPENSIVE!

I attended an Accelerated BSN program or ABSN designed for working professionals interested in a career change.

That means that it was about 4 years of nursing school compressed into 18 months of grueling torture - about at the cost of all 4 years combined!

My wife and I were pregnant with our son Taz at the time, and...

... We were buried in student debt...

...We were living on food stamps and WIC...

.. We were sleeping on a mattress I pulled from the dumpster...

...I was giving my all (what was left) to becoming a nurse...

Once Taz was born, we found out that he had a fairly rare congenital birth defect that required multiple surgeries and weeks of hospital stays, just in his first year of life.

I will never forget staying up late into the night studying for exams in his hospital room by the light of the Emergency Room signage below then waking up in the early hours with him or going across the street to school and rushing back to baby Taz.

There were times I would bring him up to the school library during his nap time so I could attend a study group while he slept in his stroller.

I was completely dedicated to being an amazing nurse.

1st Semester GPA - 4.0.

2nd Semester GPA - 4.0

I was rocking it, but Taz’s surgeries were really starting to weigh on my wife and I.

That’s when the 3rd semester started, and I got the nursing professor from hell...

She had an utter lack of understanding of education, clinical nursing, and general people skills.

Over the course of the semester she only became more and more obtuse with her thinking and was clearly not in the game of educating nursing students but reaping vengeance on some past experience.

Not quite who I was paying tens of thousands of dollars to study under...

I wanted nothing to do with this woman, and therefore this class, and even nursing school in general!

I had lost all motivation to keep going in becoming a nurse.

With only 10 weeks to go until graduation, I dropped out of nursing school...