The short answer is YES! I really do enjoy my job. Luckily for me, nursing is a career path, therefore, you can have numerous types of nursing jobs available to you and you can travel the world. Any job that I have had in nursing, I have thoroughly enjoyed and that includes my present job.
I am a haemodialysis nurse, caring for patients with chronic kidney disease / kidney failure. These patients will have to attend for dialysis treatment three times a week for a few hours at a time to basically have their blood cleaned and possibly have fluid removed from their bodies. Their kidneys do not work very well or may have even been removed, so we as nurses, care for our patients by connecting them to a dialysis machine where the machine will do the work for the kidneys. It will take the blood from the patient, clean it using an artificial kidney and then return the blood to the patient. We will care for the patient before, during and after treatment with a holistic approach to ensure they have the best possible experience for their health and well-being.
That’s a very basic explanation but it’s a pretty complex and sophisticated process. For the patients there is also a lot to consider. Not only the physical difficulties of having to have dialysis but also the emotional, mental, sociological, psychological and even economical impacts on people who have a kidney injury or failure.
As a nurse, I love to help others and make a difference in their lives. Even if it’s something small like making them smile or helping them to be at ease with being on dialysis. I try to be empathetic and compassionate with my patients, whilst remaining professional and accountable to providing the best care for them.
Nursing can be a difficult profession, however, it helps to enjoy what you do. I couldn’t imagine being a nurse if I didn’t enjoy it. If that was the case, I think you would have to leave your job!
I’m sure I can speak for all nurses when I say, we would just love to be appreciated as professional people, be treated fairly and paid accordingly. Yes, we as nurses love what we do but we still need to pay the bills.
Most of you probably know this by now 🤣 but I love going to the gym, going out for a coffee and walking. Lots and lots of walking. Maybe about 20,000 steps along a coastal route would be perfect for me.
Now that Covid isn’t so strictly monitored and folks can go out and about again, are you into after-work happy hours?
Not really to be honest. As I’m a nurse, I don’t really have the time to attend happy hours. If I am free in the afternoon, I usually head to the gym. I don’t really drink during the week and they don’t seem to have happy hours at the weekends much. Don’t get me wrong, I love happy hours but they just don’t fit into my daily schedule.
What physical traits do you share with your relatives?
Wrinkles. The ONE physical feature I have from my Dad’s side is wrinkles on my face and lots of them around my eyes. Sad but true 😜 but at least I have my hair on my head.
How long does it take you to decide if you like someone or not?
I normally make my mind up pretty quickly and I like to feel I’m a good judge of character. I like most people thankfully 😅.
GRATITUDE SECTION
Feel free to share some wisdom you live by.
Try to make the most of every day. Life is too short and you never know what is around the corner so go out and enjoy the little things in life and appreciate everything that’s good in your life 😊.
Thanks for reading and thank you Melanie for some more great questions.
This one is easy for me. My biggest challenge to date is gaining the skills to be able to move to Australia. I have travelled here many years ago on a working holiday visa and always wanted to come back and live as a resident. This is no easy thing to do. Australia has very strict immigration rules. If you want to live here in Australia, you have to be of value to them, which is fair enough really.
You can live here if you have a skill that is in demand. I had a good look at their skilled visa occupation list and picked something that I thought I could maybe learn to do and enjoy as a new career path.
Some of you will know the career path that I chose was a nursing one. Everywhere in the world is in need of nurses so I thought this would be a great career move and I had always thought of nursing in the back of my mind as I really enjoy working with people and feel like I have a caring and patient nature. Also my mum was a nurse too so I think that definitely helped with making the decision to study nursing.
Before I could study nursing I had to gain some experience in the caring profession in order to discover these two crucial points:
1 – Would I enjoy nursing?
2 – Would I be capable?
Fortunately, I applied and received my first caring role in a residential home looking after older people. To my delight, I thoroughly enjoyed the work. It was something completely different from what I had ever done before and even though it was really hard work, both physically and mentally, I found that loved it. I loved making people smile, brightening their day and I had the opportunity to work with some amazing other care workers. The experience I gained here was immeasurable.
The next question I would have to ask is, would I be eligible to apply for the course? Although nurses are highly sought after, many people also want to be nurses, making it very competitive to enrol in a nursing degree. I was gaining experience as a care assistant but I also needed the relevant qualifications. Thankfully, I had already carried out a degree beforehand and had the adequate A level results so I was able to meet the eligibility criteria.
I applied to university whilst working as a care assistant and to my horror I didn’t receive an offer of acceptance first time round. I was saddened but I had initially applied for mental health nursing and I knew already that it was highly competitive. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise.
I spent another year in the residential home and reapplied to university a year later, this time for general nursing. I became a supervisor in the residential home and continued to really enjoy the work. This gave me the confidence to apply for a nursing assistant job in a hospital, as part of the NHS. Two years after having joined the residential home, I was now working as a nursing assistant in theatres. This was an amazing job opportunity and extremely different from working in a care home.
A few months later, I received a letter to say I had been successful to study general nursing!!! This was SUCH an amazing feeling to finally be another step closer to my Australian dream.
I enrolled in university the following year and continued to work both as a care assistant in the home and as a nursing assistant in the hospital. I was able to work across four different hospitals in numerous wards throughout my journey as a nursing assistant. I will never forget the things I learned here and the amount of amazing nursing assistants and nurses that I met along the way. It showed me the many different varieties of nursing and also allowed me to discover where I enjoyed working and where I maybe wanted to avoid in the future. I would say all nurses have certain tasks that they love performing and others not so much. The joy of nursing is that there is so much choice with regards to different nursing fields. If you don’t like one aspect of nursing, you can choose another that is more suited to you and you can also work in different settings, for example, hospital, community, GP surgery, telehealth etc.
So I studied nursing for three years. A full time degree whilst working part time. Hard, hard work, long hours and very little money but I loved it again. I had the best experiences, both in placements and in the classroom. Every six weeks we would change from being on placement to being back at uni and so on, whilst every placement you were on was in a different setting.
After completing my nursing degree, I became a registered nurse and luckily was able to obtain my first job pretty quickly. There was a huge demand for nurses then in Northern Ireland so all students were able to obtain their first choice of nursing profession. I worked in my first post for two years whist trying to plan my move to Australia. It all paid off in the end. I completed all my paper work and became an Australian resident before emigrating. This was another whole process and that is for another blog down the line. I do have a previous blog post on the nursing application to be a nurse in Australia here but be aware this may have changed since then.
There you have it. My journey to become a nurse and make the move to becoming an Australia resident. The whole process took about seven years. This was my biggest challenge to date and it was a lengthy process to say the least. I am glad I faced it and overcame the process. I could have let my dream pass and stayed living at home. However, I felt that I owed myself to take on the challenge and see what living on the other side of the world would be like for a lengthy period.
Thanks for reading guys. It’s slightly longer than my previous Bloganuary posts.
90% of people here in New South Wales are double vaccinated. I am so thrilled for everyone here for pulling together, listening to the health professionals and getting their shots. I know it hasn’t been easy with some people divided over having the vaccine. However, the fact that it has been made almost compulsory to have the vaccine has enabled us to be safer in our daily lives and get back to some sort of new normal.
I’m hoping things continue to improve for us here in Australia and for everyone around the world 😷.
This blog is in response to Fandangos Provocative Question #FPQ, which is: If you have already received your initial COVID-19 vaccinations, are you intending to get a booster shot when it becomes available to you? Why or why not? If you have yet to be vaccinated for COVID-19, are you intending to ever get vaccinated? Why or why not?
Although I’m a travel blogger per se, I think this is such an interesting question and a very topical and divisive topic at present. Personally, I cannot wait to have a booster shot, 3rd vaccine in total to protect against the coronavirus.
I’m a nurse, so I appreciate the importance in protecting ourselves and others from the virus spreading. I am no medical genius by any means but I trust the medical professionals and the advice they have provided. I know with the vaccines you can still be infected and can still pass the virus on to others. However, the chances of this are significantly reduced and if you do happen to become infected, your risk of hospitalisation is decreased drastically. Very few, if any people here in Australia are hospitalised after having the initial 2 shots of the vaccine. This therefore frees the hospital beds for those people that are sick from other illnesses etc.
I believe a 3rd shot is needed to maintain a high number of antibodies in your system. I look at it like a flu shot we receive every year. Different strains may evolve again as we have seen in the past. Therefore, vaccines may need tweaking in the future again and given again to people en mass.
Even with my initial 2 vaccine shots, I still do not want to get covid 19. So bring on my 3rd shot already 🤣🤣. At present we have to wait 6 months for our booster so hopefully I can receive mine next month 🙌🏼. I think we should be extremely thankful that we have the vaccines, especially as some people living in third world countries may find it harder to obtain them or some people may lack the education and knowledge of how the vaccines work.
We made it guys! After 106 days we are now officially out of lockdown. Boy it feels good…but also a bit nerve wrecking. It’s so nice to have our freedom again, seeing people out and about, hustle and bustle everywhere. However, you can’t help but think, the virus is still out there. I’m still in favour of social distancing and trying to be as safe as possible. Although I’m double vaccinated, I’m still keen to avoid contracting coronavirus 😬.
People of Sydney, or anywhere in the world that has lived through a lockdown (I’m sure everyone has), what was the first thing you did when the lockdown was lifted???
For me, it was work as usual. Being a nurse, we didn’t have any time off during lockdown. Yes I am forever grateful to have been in employment and have some sort of normality. At least we could see our work colleagues and chat about the ever changing pandemic days whilst still earning an income. However, I’m sure I speak for many nurses, it would have been lovely to have a couple of weeks off at home. Not annual leave or being off sick but just days at home to chill out and reset. Alas it wasn’t meant to be and that’s ok.
Finishing work, it was really amazing to see people out on the streets, seeing people sitting through cafe windows enjoying their soy caps and shopping malls with shop doors finally opened again. There was a real buzz around Sydney today and it felt good, albeit a bit strange. The first thing I did was go to the gym. As much as I was slightly nervous, I couldn’t wait to get back to training and seeing friends. Finally I could lift a heavy weight again 🏋️♂️ and maybe feel the burn the next day 😅.
I hope you all enjoy the next few days/weeks of having no lockdown. What are you excited to do/see? I personally can not wait to be able to travel again ✈️.
WrookieSchU 