Older Daughter, R.N.

Long Suffering Spouse and I will be in Champaign today to attend 'pinning' ceremonies for Older Daughter as she officially, finally, becomes a nurse.

Older Daughter graduated from the University of Illinois in 2006 with a B.A. in English. I wrote at the time that Older Daughter planned to take a job for a year and decide what to do next. At that time she was flirting with going to law school -- but she had also been talking about going to nursing school. For the sake of any extraterrestrial who might be logging into this blog from the Planet Xzzyglsquat, a degree in English is not usually a steppingstone to nursing school. During the year following, Older Daughter did indeed find a job, in a hospital, in Indianapolis; I wrote about my one and only visit to her place of employment in September 2006. I don't know if it was the job or the encouragement of her boyfriend's mother, now Older Daughter's mother-in-law (herself a nurse), that nudged Older Daughter into nursing.

Whatever the inspiration, Older Daughter decided to follow this path.

And, now, finally, she's finished. Boards are early next year.

Long Suffering Spouse were not certain that Older Daughter would be able to do it. She has foot issues -- a botched surgery* during her undergraduate years has caused no end of problems. She didn't take a lot of science courses en route to her English degree; there's very little that the works of Jane Austen and organic chemistry have in common. But perhaps our greatest reservation was that Older Daughter has always been rather squeamish -- and nurses, sometimes, have to deal with things that are rather, well, icky. That's sometimes as in several times per shift, right MJ?

But Older Daughter has persevered and overcome these challenges. So we'll be in the car most of the day. And it will almost certainly snow. We'll deal with it.

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* The word "botched" is used here to describe a less than optimal outcome and does not express a professional opinion about whether the doctor committed malpractice. I told Older Daughter, in fact, that she had no viable case. Some time later, giving into family pressure, I referred her to a prominent, successful attorney that I know in the Champaign area. He referred it back to an attorney in Chicago -- consistent with my theory that there are -- despite the panicky headlines -- only a handful of attorneys truly qualified to handle a medical malpractice case, even in a state like Illinois with nearly 80,000 lawyers. Anyway, the high-powered malpractice attorney told my daughter the same thing I had -- that, even if the case had real merit, my daughter's injury was insufficient to justify the enormous expense involved. (I wrote about this here.)