Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Getting from here to there

1999; Elsevier BV; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s1353-6117(99)80049-3

1873-698X

Christine Eustace,

Dietetics, Nutrition, and Education

Have you ever reflected back on the journey that you first embarked upon and marvelled at how you arrived at the place you are today? This article comes from that reflective place for me as a registered nurse, Chiropractor, nutrition educator and complementary therapy networker. It started at the age of five or six years. My mother would relay the story of how I would offer everyone the throwup pan, regardless of their malady, in an effort to assist them through their illness. I guess on some levels I was born with the care-taker gene. I grew up on Ben Casey and Dr Kildare and continue to be a medical show addict. Admittedly, I was a reticent student in high school. I believe it was a combination of boredom and the inability to learn the way that I was being taught. Consequently I did not take the requisite chemistry and/or biology exams for nursing school. Beside which the idea of going to nursing school for three additional years was a nightmare. I agreed much to my parent's chagrin to complete 1 year of training as a practical nurse. This training was almost unbearable except that it was more like an apprenticeship so I was actually working without getting paid. After 2 years I had come to the revelation that my practical nurse duties were pretty much the same as the registered nurses but that my salary was not. I then made the decision to return to the dreaded classroom. Within 9 months of graduating from RN school I returned to college to obtain a bachelors degree. Oh no, I was now becoming a classroom junkie. Post BSN graduation I started going through withdrawal, what next? I have all this free time, shouldn't I be doing something productive with it? After all I 'm only working 8 hours and sleeping 8 hours a day; I still have 8 hours with nothing to do. So I enrolled in night school for a masters in health education. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but it kept me off the streets at night. Working as a staff nurse in Intensive Care, I was observing eager physicians scheduling frightened patients for open-heart surgery without really getting informed consent from them. The poor patients didn't understand that they could say 'no' , 'not today' and 'maybe not ever'. When the outcome was less than perfect the staff had to deal with both the disgruntled surgeons and the grieving families. When I completed my masters I had a mission. I knew that I wanted to teach patients that they had choices. But in 1980, in Philadelphia, the only choices patients had were to take a weight management, smokers cessation, hypertension or diabetic class and none of these appealed to my sense of choice. So what was there to teach? I also realized that with a master's degree I was going to have to do a tremendous amount of public relations work. I was not, am not and never will be, a salesperson so the idea of selling people the wonders of health education did not thrill me. I had a thot (chiropractic for thought) flash that if I had a Dr in front of my name patients, clients and practice members would help with the public relations aspect of my new found career. Now the big question was what kind of Dr did I want to be? Being a nurse I had first hand knowledge of what an internship was all about and I was not willing to give up a year of my life. I was also not into 'huff and mouth disease' so I did not want to be a dentist or a podiatrist. Who or what was left? How about Chiropractor? I had remembered my mother going to one and making a house call for my dad, but I really had no idea what they did. So, off I went to experience the care of a chiropractor.