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Hospitals have always meant home for me. Some of my earliest memories were of being in the hospital.

It was the early eighties. My mother was a switchboard operator (like the kind of switch board operator that physically plugged one line into the next in order to transfer the call…think The Marvelous Misses Maisel working in the basement.). There was always soda, coffee, and someone smoking. Women worked here.

On the occasion that my dad was away on business, I would pack a bag and go to work with my mother, who worked third shift. I would hang out in the switchboard room and play with the toys in the waiting room. Aside from the large statue of Mary, the waiting room was set up more like a living room. There was a green couch that eventually, in the late evening, would be set up as my bed.

I remember visiting with Sister Malitna, a sparklie-eyed nun who would joke and chat with me. With a mischievous grin, and an air secrecy, she would lead me to the chocolate stash in the cafeteria.

I remember the early morning break rooms, filled with chatter and a haze of smoke that would filter the early morning light.

Like life in general, healthcare in the early eighties was a little messy, yet there was love. There was an acceptance of humanity and the frailty that comes with this state.

I fear that with the corporatization of healthcare we are loosing the love and connection we are all craving. I fear that we are looking to metrics and productivity without a mind to the purpose of healthcare, which would include curiosity, compassion and maintaining human dignity.

SCHOOL DAYS

In Kindergarten, we took a class trip to the hospital that my mother worked. In the context of that trip, I felt like the hospital was my hospital, after all…I knew where the secret chocolate stash was, I slept on the “living room” couch.

As a kid, when people would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would answer, “a veterinarian”, “a marine biologist”, “ a biology teacher”, or “not a nurse”.

My mother and my brother went to nursing school at about the same time. I was in high school. They were the first in our family to get a college degree. Nursing was practical and purposeful and had a clear direction. I appreciated the integration of science with a care for the whole person, but by the time I went to college, I was determined to break their mould.

I was the first in my family to go to college without a clear direction. At seventeen I packed up and headed to UW Madison for an adventure: my undergrad. Not one person in my family voiced that I was making good choices. There was constant questioning about the direction of my life and rather than encourage my love for many academic areas, I was encouraged to narrow my view….but I like things to be open (…minds, hearts, doors, spaces).

I meandered. I wanted to be an anthropologist. Perhaps study fresh water and the environment? I took classes in primatology, parasitology and entomology. I studied women's travel writings and got together with four other women, including the professor, just to talk about travel…for credit. I regret none of this. Ultimately I became a zoology major: a degree-to-get-another-degree, as I would always say when my family probed, “What are you going to do with that?”.

I was nearing graduation when I took a Social Psychology course. Psychology has always been an interest of mine. I enjoy thinking about thinking and learning about human behavior. Prior to the Social Psych course, I took a course in abnormal psychology but found that it didn’t quite resonate with me. It seemed to bias towards a rather black and white vantage point that suggests that either behavior is categorically abnormal or normal, which, with some diagnoses could be true….mostly though, I find this vantage-point to be lacking.

I believe that people’s behavior makes a lot of sense once you learn a person’s story. I believe that people are usually doing the best that they can. The framework of Social Psychology embodies these ideas. Human behavior, in many ways, is predictable. If you put humans in certain situations, patterns of behavior emerge and unforeseen associations can be revealed. This framework for studying human behavior appealed to me…so I became a Psychology major too.

Ultimately, I did not want to do research. I didn’t care to become a psychologist and I didn’t want to council people or medicate them for their behavior ). I pivoted toward the healthcare field, leaving my psychology degree to the wayside.

I had also declared myself as having a “Pre-Physician Assistant Studies” status. A year into my studies I learned of the Physician Assistant healthcare role. I was drawn to this collaborative model of care and deeply considered this career in Medicine.

After graduation, I suffered the consequences of my decision to get a degree-to-get-another-degree. I had to start paying off my loans while making about seven dollars an hour working as an EMT for a private ambulance company, then a little more to work as an Emergency Department Tech in order to gain healthcare experience that would lead me to admission to UW Madison’s PA program.

EM PA

Fast-forward: I have spent greater than a decade working in the Emergency Department as a Physician Assistant. I went back to school when my oldest daughter was a year old. I now have 3 children. Training and parenting and training again once I was out of school took over my life. I often refer to that decade as the decade that I hardly looked up. I couldn’t see things in a broad, open way because I was so focused on the important tasks in front of me.

Now I am here. My kids are in school and I have a breadth and depth of experience that comes with this phase of life. I see patterns and connections between the study of social psychology and what the healthcare system needs.