Choosing Graduate School

I never wanted to go to graduate school. After my first dose of nursing school I never wanted to attend nursing school again. Most nurses I try to recruit to doctoral studies make similar statements. I think a generation of nursing scholars has been lost due to a generation of problems in basic nursing school. In spite of this not long after graduation with my BSN I had a dream about working with nursing faculty in a ship’s crow’s nest. It was a baffling dream and upon awakening I was terrified. My people mostly do not go to collich. We especially do not go to graduate school.

In spite my issues with nursing school I loved bedside nursing and looked forward to work every day for much of my bedside career. My first job is still my favorite. I loved report, primary care nursing, introducing myself to my patients and even writing care plans. I looked forward to my conversations with patients and I even liked documentation. I loved running assertiveness group and the community meetings we had at shift change for days and evenings. At that first job developed the habit of planning my day on a little red or blue card with an entry for each patient, writing what I needed to do, leaving space for interesting patient comments. I never doubted that my patients would say interesting things.

Soon after graduation from my BSN studies, I joined the family assessment team and took advanced training in family therapy. I started working extra hours so that I could perform family interventions without interfering with my bedside nursing time. I developed a way to use family genogram interviews to work with individuals and also studied and used the work of Milton Erickson and as well as narrative therapy in my practice. I was acknowledged by my peers who were mostly master’s prepared psychiatric nurses as a very good clinician, some said gifted.

Times changed and we got a new medical director who shut down all nursing therapeutics. He initially forbade us to talk to the patients but apparently that was illegal! Nurses are required to talk to patients. In 1988, the new medical director was strictly committed to biopsychiatry and did not want any other therapeutics performed that might skew the ability to see the results of biopsychiatric therapeutics. We lost our family assessment team and most of our nursing groups. I was to take vital signs and pass medications and only speak to patients on a superficial basis. The new medical director shouted and threw things at nurses. There was no respite in sight from this new direction in acute care psychiatry. Group homes shut down and funding for patient care on an outpatient basis dried up. I had a dream that I left this work setting for lunch and never returned. I just kept walking around the Burke Gillman trail, never turning back.

In a very short time I became frustrated with my work and took up creative writing and ballroom dancing on a serious basis. I had planned to write the stories that Raymond Carver’s daughter might have written but wound up writing poetry after a Centrum Writer’s Workshop in Port Townsend, Washington. I used the ballroom dancing to get out of my head. I tried to stop developing care plans and family genograms in my head for every person I met. I dated a lot.

I quit working extra hours and then moved to working nights only, then to weekends only—12 hour shifts. Eventually I left this job, tried to move back to Texas, failed that, and came back to Washington to work at a different hospital. The psychiatric unit at the new hospital took care of much more acute patients. I was excited by the acuity but dismayed by the lack of primary care nursing, all registered nursing staff, and by the modest nursing therapeutics. There were no nursing run groups.

I still had my patients to talk to and still managed to have very interesting conversations with patients and families and learned much about chronic mental illness. Because of the systematic limitations on nursing care I functioned at a much lower level of practice but enjoyed my work because of the patients. I worked overtime only for money and developed more family relationships.

I never saw any reason to go to graduate school until I injured my cervical spine due to being rear-ended three times in 18 months. I started to fear my job because of the need to perform physical shows-of-force when a patient lost control and became assaultive or tried to harm himself. I could no longer dance because I had chronic pain. I learned to ignore the pain for walking around but was scared to dance.

I started looking for ways to leverage my nursing training into other kinds of work. I visited a career counselor who looked at my natal astrological chart [for real]. She said I had to go to graduate school and get a PhD because of the planet Jupiter in my 9th house. She said I’d been rear ended because my soul wanted me to move on and get my work done. She also started an esoteric mystery school and said I had to come. I was an old soul with work to do, stuff to remember. I said I’d go to ARNP school and she’d have to settle for that. I was a clinician and did not want to have anything to do with more nursing school than I had to. I finally agreed to mystery school.

I met the love of my life the year I was to start school. She decided to go to graduate school with me, not as a student but as my partner. She grew up on a college campus and helped me a lot with the process.