Turning 24, and What Working in Healthcare Has Taught Me

Writing this the night before my 24th birthday, I can confidently say that the biggest thing I feel I practiced this year was gratitude.

This desire to focus more intentionally on gratitude didn’t come from a social media post with a catchy title and an uplifting song, and it didn’t come from the kinda depressing transition that happens after you graduate college and your week is no longer packed with date parties and living with four of your best friends.

My desire to consistently practice gratitude comes from the little kid I take care of who tells me about the pet back home that they miss so much. It comes from the dad who tells me he gets sad puppy eyes from the other parents he sees in the elevator when the doors open to pick him up from the oncology floor. I am constantly inspired by the families I meet who continue to praise God and cherish all the moments with their little ones in the heartbreaking season they are in—one I can only begin to imagine.

It is hard to find gratitude on the job when you catch a glimpse of the darkness these children and families are having to endure. And I never want gratitude to become a way of minimizing what they are going through. There is nothing beautiful or fair about a child having to fight cancer, and their suffering is not something we need to turn into a lesson in order to find meaning in our own lives.

As nurses, we have a tendency to work a bunch of shifts in a row so we can get a week or so off to refresh our minds and bodies, spend time with the people who ground us, or even go on a big vacation. The night before heading back to long 12-hour shifts in the hospital, we fight the surge of something my dad has always called “the Sunday blues” by reminding (and maybe convincing) ourselves that we really do love our jobs. IYKYK. I’ll check to see who I get to work with the next day and plan to make the yummiest coffee in the morning to prepare and excite myself for the long day ahead.

But something shifts in your mind and heart when you step onto the floor and are assigned to take care of the same precious patient you had the day before your vacation ten days ago.

They should have, but they never got to go home and come back.

They never got to spend a full 24 hours with their whole family or with their dog. Their world just stopped moving while time went on. The days blended into each other for them while you got to spend time away.

I don’t say this to make any nurse feel guilty for taking time off. If anything, I hope it does the opposite. I try to preach here that we need to live our lives in a way that reminds us we are so much more than being a nurse. We need our time away. We need to see our people, sleep in our own beds, and remember who we are outside of the hospital. That way, we can come back to work and be everything our patients need us to be and more.

But working in healthcare has made me never want to take certain things for granted, and I hope I can encourage you to do the same.

A warm shower in your own home after a long day. Grocery shopping because you have a kitchen to cook in. The comfort of your own bed. The simple luxury of being able to leave your home and know that you get to come back to it.

There’s a sweet patient and tiny friend of mine whose last hospital stay lasted nearly three months. Every day, he would ask his mom to show him what his room looked like, almost as if he had forgotten while being away from it for so long.

It broke me every time I watched the interaction as his nurse, for him and for mom.

I pray so much for these kids to never have hospital stays so long that they forget what home even feels like, let alone looks like. But unfortunately, that too often becomes reality on a unit like ours.

Something I never realized before becoming an inpatient nurse is that when certain kids stay in the hospital for long periods of time, they can become “deconditioned.” Due to a lack of movement while being sick and on bedrest for too long, their bodies can experience physical and functional decline. Just lifting their head from the pillow can feel like an extreme task, and getting up to use the bathroom can become a long-term goal to work toward.

Meanwhile, it is so easy for us to go through the motions of our days, rushing to our Pilates classes, sweating and hating ourselves halfway through them for signing up in the first place because of the burn we’re feeling.

But how wonderful is it that we can move our bodies well enough to push through those burns? How incredible that our lungs can work hard enough to provide us with the oxygen we need, and that our hearts can pound hard enough to remind us that we are alive. That our bodies can carry us through the things we ask them to do, even when we don’t always appreciate them for it.

I saw somewhere that we can think of that pounding heart as an inner applause—quietly cheering us on for everything our bodies are capable of doing.

Things I used to consider ordinary don’t feel quite so ordinary anymore. I’ve said it once, and I will say it again and again: being a peds oncology nurse has changed my outlook on every little thing.

But maybe gratitude is only part of what it has taught me.

When you spend your days watching how quickly life can change, you start to think differently about the life you are building, too.

Working in healthcare has taught me a difficult lesson: outcomes are never truly within our control.

I have hard conversations with parents who sit there blaming themselves when their child ends up back in the hospital with a new infection, saying, “We did everything right.” And I try to convince them that this was not their fault.

As nurses, we can also feel like we are doing everything right. We complete thorough head-to-toe assessments. We listen to our patients. We advocate for them. We learn to recognize the early signs of complications. We do everything we have been trained to do, and sometimes the outcome is still not ours to determine.

Sometimes there was nothing we could have caught. Nothing we could have fought earlier for. And I think that lesson extends far beyond the hospital.

At 24, it is easy to look around and feel like everyone else is moving ahead. Your friends are taking different paths, gaining new opportunities, moving to new cities, getting married, going on blind dates, going to graduate school, traveling, changing careers, or simply figuring out what they want next. Meanwhile, you can feel like you are supposed to have some sort of master plan for your own life.

But as a nurse, I have been a witness to how quickly life can change. I have watched plans disappear overnight, families completely redefine what they thought their future would look like, and people face realities they never could have anticipated. Their strength amazes me, and I think it is something that can only come from God.

When you realize how little control we actually have over some of the biggest things in life, timelines start to feel a little less important.

Maybe I don’t need to know exactly where I will be at 25, 30, or 60.

Maybe the real challenge is becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

There are so many things you cannot control: how quickly you reach your goals, when someone leaves your life, what opportunities come your way, what your twenties will look like, or what tomorrow will bring.

What you can control is how you show up. We can control whether we choose to be present or whether we love people well. Whether we choose to allow an unexpected outcome to change us without allowing it to harden our hearts.

That is something the lack of control I see in healthcare has slowly taught me.

I keep a list in my notes app of things I witness or hear on the job that melt my heart. It not only reminds me what a joy it is to witness moments like these, but also reminds me how incredibly fearless these kids are. Some are difficult to dwell on, and some are just silly.

One of the quotes was from an eight-year-old patient I had one night. We were chatting quietly in the darkness, staying quiet while his mom slept. He told me, “I’ll be 3 for 3!” with a big smile on his face.

When I asked what he meant, he said, “3 for 3. If I beat cancer twice, I’ll beat it a third.”

Immediate chills down my spine.

I hate that something like that is being said from his mouth so confidently. An eight-year-old boy should be showing off about being 3 for 3 at bat, not in striking cancer out.

But if there is one place where I find gratitude, it is in getting to be such a small part of such a little superhero’s story. And maybe that is why the little moments stay with me so much.

The rest of my notes app looks like bringing birthday cakes to patients and seeing their smiles, a kid saying the blessing and doing the sign of the cross before swallowing his 4 a.m. steroid medicine, and another little girl saying, “She’s really good!” every time I had almost closed the door but could still hear.

These moments don’t erase the hard ones. They don’t make the circumstances these kids and families are facing any less painful. But they remind me that even in the middle of something incredibly difficult, there can still be moments worth holding onto.

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and while I wish childhood cancer were something fewer families ever had to know, I am grateful for the opportunity to tell even a tiny piece of these kids’ stories. Not because their battles need to make us grateful, but because they deserve to be seen, remembered, and fought for.

So, year twenty-four, I don’t want a perfect life from you. I don’t even want a more perfectly planned life. I want more presence in the life I am already living.

I want to notice the people who make my life feel like home. I want to notice the mornings when I wake up healthy enough to get out of bed and start another day. I want to notice the moments that I would normally rush through. I want to appreciate my body for what it allows me to do instead of asking it to be something different, and to be content with not knowing exactly what comes next.

Because if working in healthcare has taught me anything, it is that life is too unpredictable to spend all of it waiting for the next thing to happen.

I am grateful for 24 years of life, and I am beyond thankful to know the kids I take care of who inspire me, and are too young to even know it.

Here’s to finding beauty and purpose in the ordinary, making peace with what I cannot control, and learning to be fully present for the life I already have.

I think that is enough for this year.

Join me, would ya? <3