Phew. If you had asked me five years ago where I would be working in 2007 there is no way I would have been able to give you an answer! Firmly entrenched in the realm of business development, internet security and government contracts, I guess I thought I would happily continue with administrative work until the cows came home. Then I had a reality check. Did I REALLY want to keep working in an office for the rest of my working life? Or was there something else out there that would be challenging, meaningful and rewarding? At the age of 36, with three teenage children, there was still time to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up...
I remember as a very young child visiting relatives and friends at the Canberra Hospital - the REAL Canberra Hospital, situated on the idyllic shores of Lake Burley Griffin. In those days nurses wore starched white uniforms, caps and lovely flowing red capes. I'm not sure how practical the capes were in the cold Canberra winters, but I owned a red cape and whenever we visited the hospital I wore it and pretended that I was one of the nurses. Perhaps this was the first step in my journey to become a nurse.
Maybe it was one too many episodes of E.R. or House. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis. Maybe it was a moment of madness. Or maybe, just maybe, I had finally found the courage to pursue a life long dream. My father-in-law had been undergoing treatment for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and during visits to the hospital over a few years I decided that I wanted to study nursing at university. I enrolled in the university prep course so that I could get a tertiary entrance score, slogged my heart out over a long hot summer to get good grades, and applied to the University of Canberra for a position in their nursing course. In 2004 I was accepted and began the three year journey towards becoming a registered nurse.
