After graduating college in March of 2008 and gaining a Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing, I immigrated to the United States of America in May of 2009.
I spent the whole summer of that year as a Seafood Worker at Peter Pan Seafoods, Inc. in King Cove, Alaska; with an average of 16 hour workdays almost daily for 3 and a half months, against physical and mental fatigue amidst the infamous cold of Alaska, especially on a small sand spit on the Aleutian Islands in between the Bering Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south, I learned the value of Patience, Focus, Grit, Mind Over Matter, and the power of knowing your 'Why.'
July of 2012, I started working as a Patient Care Technician at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage.
I was already receiving several letters of appreciation from the Clinical Manager, Assistant Clinical Manager, as well as different Head Nurses complementing and thanking me for the work that I do on the hospital floor even before I finished my required training, with 3 Nursing Departments (Float Pool, Medical-Surgical, Orthopedics) competing as they woo me to stay and transfer to their areas upon training completion; where the Medical Center's Director of Nursing, who has worked there for 50 years, had to intervene and ask for a meeting with me to settle the matter.
I, eventually, ended up choosing to stay with the department that initially hired me, the Float Pool, because Loyalty matters a lot to me.
Working at PAMC, I learned to appreciate the importance of Empathy, Compassion, Kindness, and Sincerity.
We have this basic idea of hospitals as a place for the sick and the dying, but spending a little more than 2 months there, almost everyday, made me realize that while it may be true, hospitals are also a place of hope and courage, of people fighting for their lives, mustering up whatever is left in them to give their next breath all that they got, a place where -----------nts of humanity give you endless opportunities not just to be there for someone else but to nurture your soul more so.
