My first encounter with nursing began in 1986 at Effia-Nkwanta Regional Hospital in Ghana, West Africa, where I was born and raised. I was twenty-two years old and my mom was in the intensive care unit on a ventilator. During one of my visits, a nurse asked me to assist in turning my mom to prevent her from getting bed sores. While assisting the nurse with turning my mom, I questioned the nurse about her profession and the lack of men working in the field. She responded candidly with “men are doctors and women are nurses”. These words didn’t seem farfetched until 1989 when I landed in the United States to find out that both men and women were working in the field of Nursing.
After working in several types of occupations ranging from housekeeping at a hospital and building fire
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I continued my education at Gordon College in Barnesville, Georgia for my RN degree. During one of my ICU rotations at Grady Memorial Hospital, I fell in love with the collaboration between nurses and doctors. The skill set of the nurses there was astonishing. They were taking care of patients on vents, rotating them in special beds for acute respiratory distress syndrome, managing patients after open heart surgeries, dealing with patients with open abdomens, and more.
After graduation I sought out and secured a job in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) at Grady. After I felt comfortable with my skills set and experience, I transferred to the Rapid Response Team within Grady in 2010. In August 2013, a new twenty bed OBSERVATION UNIT -Clinical Decision Unit (CDU) was opened with in the emergency room. After visiting this area, I noticed the nurse practitioners solely in control of the area.
I witnessed Nurse Practitioners (NP) managing patients with congestive heart failures, (CHF), Diabetes, chest pain, asthma, and many more acute illnesses. My admiration for the role of NP grew