Florence Nightingale Museum, Old Operating Theatre, Journal #4

Well there have been TONS of things going on the last few days, we went to the Florence Nightingale Museum and got to see a lot of artifacts and really cool things about Flo. We also got to Tour a NHS hospital which was a very intriguing experience to say the least. Things are different over here, they still have bays instead of just single rooms and nurses have on avg 7 patients as opposed to 4-5 eek!
Today we went to the old operating theatre which is part of the old St Thomas hospital and it was a teaching operating room it was really amazing and outside of it in an attic area they had set up a museum which had really interesting medical instruments and things which I also found very interesting though not everyone might. We then went on the King Cholera walk which was pretty much just a tour talking about how cholera was spread and about the really bad living quarters and things like waste water being put into the Thames back in the day which makes all of us nursing majors cringe at the thought. And after that we went to a noodle bar called waggamammas for noodles! It is kinda like a mix of pei wei and Indian food I would think because they had a lot of dishes that had curry in them. But it was very good.

Story of the day: So after years of anticipation for some, the time has come, one week and one day from TODAY Maggie and her flatmates will be seeing…. Wait for it…. WICKED!!!... granted we had to go all over town, wait in long lines and pay more than we wanted to for the tickets but we have waited long enough. I have wanted to see this show FOREVER and it is time. Our student ID’s got shot down because they did not have an expiration date on them, thanks TCU, there go the 25 lb tickets, they don’t sell any half price face value because they are in such high demand, thanks for being so popular wicked. BUT we did not pay 60lbs for our tickets so YAY US!! So I shall be posting next Wednesday night about the greatness that is wicked, and tonight we will all be listening to the sound track to celebrate getting 6 tickets together for a show while we were here…. YAY!


Below are some pictures and then my last journal for Diane and Susan before my midterm tomorrow. I will post the rest of the pictures on facebook.













Yesterday we went to the Florence Nightingale museum. I was very excited about the prospect of learning more about the origin of nursing and how it came about but I did not realize that in doing so I would in fact learn more about myself.
The day started as any other, far too early with loud people above us, loud cars outside and bright lights streaming in at what seems like 5am. Me and my flatmates hopped on the tube (which we have become quite familiar with by now) to St. Thomas’ hospital and then walked the rest of the way there. When we had all gathered in front of the museum we entered together and were given audio guides that were stethoscopes which you placed the diaphragm on the lighted places throughout the museum so that you could listen to pieces of history as you walked around reading and looking at artifacts.

The exhibit that stuck out most to me was the one that said “the call to nurse” I read the tablet that was next to the exhibit but the audio guide for it was out of order. There was a bench next to it and I sat down for a moment to let it all sink in. The exhibit said “Florence felt from a young age that God was ‘calling’ her. But she did not know for years what her vocation should be. Her Christian faith was the driving force throughout her life. She believed in helping others less fortunate than herself by understanding God’s laws and His will through statistics. Just before her 17th birthday, Florence felt she heard God’s ‘voice’ speaking to her. This happened soon after she had discovered a talent for nursing while caring for her family and their servants during a flu epidemic. She gradually felt that God was calling her to be a nurse- a shocking idea then. Nursing was not a job for an intelligent, good-looking young woman like Florence. Only working class women nursed for a living. Her parents were horrified and anxious.”

Out of all the things I had learned about “Flo” through nursing school, I guess this had just passed me by somehow and yesterday it just hit me in the chest. How many of us are becoming nurses because of the shortage? How many because it’s “the right thing to do”? How many because of the money, our parents? But even more interesting, how many of us truly feel called by God to be nurses? One question that has been asked of us by our instructors since we arrived is what brought us to TCU, what brought us to TCU’s nursing school? How many of us answered “God called me to be a nurse so here I am.”

In high school I worked as an Athletic Trainer for the Football team and I loved it, and I loved my A&P class , partly because I had a WONDERFUL teacher , who BTW was taught by a WONDERFUL teacher DR.B. Because of working in the healthcare field then, I knew that I in some way wanted to be in the field helping people whether it was PT , AT or nursing. I always joke that the reason I didn’t go to Arkansas and become a Physical Therapist was because of all of the chemistry I would have had to have taken but to be quite honest the more and more I think about it the more I truly believe that TCU is where I was always supposed to be. Yes it was closer to home, yes it was more expensive but in the end everything happens for a reason and if everything had not happened just exactly how it did I would not be where I am today.

I think that being able to look at it from a religious perspective, being a religious person has made it a much richer experience for me. It has changed my outlook on things in nursing because as Diane said today “as nurses we don’t want to see someone hurting.” The best way I can say that I related this whole experience to my practice is that my life is my practice, I AM my practice. If I was not who I am and I did not have the heart for my patients the way that I do I would make a crummy nurse, and no one wants a crummy nurse. I think that being able to finally see that nursing really is “ a God thing” for me, the way everything worked out, me coming to TCU, meeting the people I did and making the choices I did all stemmed from the fact that it was where God wanted me to be doing what God wanted me to do. He made it all possible and without Him it would not have happened.

With all the health problems that I have experienced throughout nursing school, with the deaths in the family, with the stress, the graduating early, EVERYTHING, I can promise you I never would have been able to do it alone. And I didn’t. I will never take credit for that because it was not me that was able to accomplish those things. It was me and God taking on these things together. One day at a time. Even though I tried to take too much on at once, I know I know.