Jon’s Story on His Personal Journey

What’s up guys? My name’s Jon Haws RN and I’m going to tell you a little bit about my nursing journey. Awesome. Well thank you Jon. You’re welcome.

Why and how did you know that you wanted to be a nurse and what did the application process look like for you? It was really kind of interesting. My story. I never once wanted to be a nurse. I never grew up ever thinking about being a nurse. I don’t have any nurses in my family. It wasn’t something I ever considered myself being when I first considered it the first time, it was a friend of mine who was in medical school at the time and he called me one day. I was 25 years old and I was considering maybe becoming a physician. So I was starting to take some of the prereqs for medical school. He called me, he was a second year of medical school and he said, Jon, don’t become a doctor. Medical school is hell.

He said, what you should become is a CRNA. And I said, well, what’s a CRNA? He’s like, it’s a nurse. He had better schedule, better time with your family, you still make a great living and you can get out of nursing school right away, start making money and then go back to CRNA school. So I started searching CRNA school and what a CRNA was and it sounded intriguing to me. You get to work ICU to start out and then you get to do anesthesia, which I thought was really cool. So that was kind of my plan and I hadn’t been in college for a while, so all my prereqs rolled and all that stuff, but I used a website and found some nursing schools that I thought would work. I applied to the second-degree school and I at the same time I applied, I went, I applied for a job, a corporate job with my business degree at Academy sports.

So I applied for both at the same time. And then my wife and I went out of the country for two weeks. And this was before like cell phones and stuff were super big. So on that trip, I got a call from, or I got an email from the job saying I got the job and when I arrived back in the country, I had an acceptance letter for nursing school. So we really had to decide, am I going to be business world or am I going to do nursing? And we decided to call the nursing school and say, Hey, can I defer my application or can I defer my acceptance for six till next semester? We had some things come up and didn’t tell them everything and they were like, yeah, that’s no problem. I called Academy sports and said, I’ll take the job.

And so we moved down to Houston and to take the job, which was a four-hour move for us. And within the first week of that job, I knew I hated it. It was hell. It was in a cubicle. It was working just behind a computer and just hated it so much in order to start nursing school that I still finish microbiology and a couple of courses. So I enrolled in those courses at night to those courses, finish those up. And at the same time we found out my wife was pregnant, so we packed everything up. I quit my job over and started nursing school in that January. So it was kind of a whirlwind of how it all happened, but it got me started in a second degree program.

Nice. Awesome. What was the hardest part of nursing school for you?

Honestly, the hardest part was maintaining my mental health. I didn’t do a really good job of it. You know, you’d always heard nursing school is hard and so I was prepared for that. I worked my butt off. I was in the library every day and made the grade and all but the mental health of everything combined. And I had already done college before this, I was second degree student, but the mental health of all that there is to study on top of the clinical on top of learning how to take care of a human being, on top of family and having a child and professors that didn’t seem to want to be professors that were really just trying to get away from the bedside. All of that piled up, um, is incredibly difficult. And I would say that trying to maintain mental health to a point where you can finish nursing school was the hardest thing for me. In fact I ended up withdrawing with only 10 weeks left to go of nursing school because it just became too much, took a year off, came back and finished.

So to go off of that question, what is one thing that you wish someone would have told you about nursing school?

I think the biggest thing that, and this goes along the same thing and it’s probably, you know, a little different than what some people would say, but I would say learn to be forgiving of yourself. And learn to love yourself. A lot of people going into nursing school are straight A students. They’re hard workers. They know it’s going to be hard and they care deeply about their patients. But when they get that first F on that first exam or when they have a patient yell at them or hit them, or they have a professor tell them that their homework was terrible or they get a care plan with red ink all over it, it starts to get really hard. You know, a lot of us are type A personalities. We work really hard and we are used to achieving at a high level. So once that gets brought into question a little bit, I think it becomes too hard to judge yourself and get down on yourself. So I would really say learning to love yourself and I don’t, I don’t know how you do that. There’s an author Brenae Brown, Brown. She writes a lot of books about this stuff and has a bunch of podcasts on it. I would honestly spend the semester, the couple months before nursing school absorbing some of her stuff.

What’s one thing you’ll never forget about your experience in nursing school? 

To be honest though. The one thing that I’ll probably remember most is the last exam. We’d actually already planned to move back to Texas. I moved up to Illinois for nursing school and I showed up to the last exam in a U haul packed with all of our stuff and the only thing I had was a rolled up student notes. As soon as the exam finished, I walked out of the classroom, threw them in the garbage, got in the U haul and drove to st Louis for that night. I was ready to be done with it. I was ready to say goodbye to that. And in complete honesty, just being done with it done. I don’t blame you.

What is, a memorable patient story that you have for us? So one story I’ll share and I share it sometimes when I talk to people in about a week or two after finishing my ICU internship.

So I had just become a nurse and I had been precepted, about two weeks after that,, I was all on my own right. And I was taking care of patients all by myself and I arrived to work and I was told I was gonna take care of a patient who they were going to withdraw care on, which means you turn off the ventilator, turn off the medications and let the patient, expire, pass away. And so he’s all the way down at the hall into the hall by himself. And this was one of my first times to ever do this. And it’s a lot of work. You have to involve the chaplain, the respiratory therapy, the physician, the family, all of these different things are involved with it. And so I remember walking down to that room a little scared, a little terrified, honestly.

And I walk in the room and I tell him, I was like, we’re going to, we’re going to have it a good night here. We’re going to take care of your son and, and this is how it’s all going to go. And I kind of explained to them how it’s going to go. And at that moment, you know, I get all the people that need to be there, the respiratory therapist, and uh, we turn off the ventilator and about 10, 15 minutes or so go by and the patient passes away and at this time all the family’s there. Um, and so I kinda shut the blinds and um, kinda put a blanket over him and tell the family to take their time, say their goodbyes and leave them in the room and let them kinda just be there and say goodbye to this guy. And he’s, he’s younger.

I mean he’s probably in his 50s. Uh, so his mom’s there, his brother’s there, his kids are there, all this stuff. He’d had a massive stroke. So after a couple of hours, you know, we kind of let the family take their time and stuff. All the family starts to leave and the only person left is the mom. And so I go on, I kinda talked to her and then let her have a few more minutes to be alone with their son. And I stand outside the room and then when she’s ready to leave, she comes out of the room and she’s a short little lady, probably not even five feet. She reaches around and gives me a huge hug, looks at my name badge says, Jon, I’ll never forget you. Thank you for taking care of my son. I love you. And in that moment, you know, all those, all my whys, all my reasons for becoming a nurse really made a lot of sense that I was there to take care of people.

I was there to give comfort to people. Um, and I knew also in that moment that like she wasn’t talking to like me, right, that I represented all the nurses. There wasn’t a physician there, there wasn’t another provider, there wasn’t a respiratory therapist there, there was no one else there that she was talking to. But the nurse. And in that moment I really represented nurses and this profession. And so that really impacted me a lot. That’s been years ago now and I still remember her. I remember that experience. And so I would say in those moments, especially in nursing school and it all gets hard, but you’ll have that moment and you will represent all nurses. So, you know, take that, take that weight and, and realize that that’s going to come and it’s a very fulfilling moment to have that experience. Yeah. For sure. Do you have any regrets in your nursing school journey? Just nursing school?

I’ll preface this by saying if you look from the outside, there’s probably a lot of things that should have been done differently. Like I shouldn’t have withdrawn that last semester, right? I should’ve started nursing school sooner. I should have been easier on myself. I should have all of these things, X, Y, Z, so many things that should have been done different. Probably, however, especially the whole thing with taking a year off. I’d be a year further along in my career, right? A whole another year of earning a whole nother year of all these things. But my mental health was in such a place that I don’t think I would have even finished it. If I had finished, I would have probably burned out, uh, if I’d gone straight from school to there and everything that, I mean, I don’t, I honestly don’t regret withdrawing from school.

As far as starting nursing school sooner. Like I said, like even if I hadn’t taken that job, so if I had taken not taken that job and not withdrawn, I would’ve been 18 months ahead in my nursing career. Right. But if I hadn’t taken that job, I would’ve been up at nursing school thinking, man, this is so hard. If I had just done that job, everything would be better. Right. If I hadn’t studied so hard and not pass them in cliques, you know, so it’s hard to say that I have any regrets. I think maybe I wish I had honestly, you know, maybe worked out a little bit more and stuff. I think it would’ve been a good physical release when, when we first had our son, I would take them up to the gym and work out a little bit. And that was kind of nice, but as the kids got older and stuff, I kind of stopped doing that.

And so I think as that stress built up, you know, it would’ve been good to have some sort of physical exertion even just walking even more. What is the worst thing that you’ve ever seen in, um, practice? Probably poop, like, no, I mean, I don’t gag it, the worst types of surgery. I don’t gag of blood. I don’t get any of the mucus and sectioning like that. For me it was, it was poop. That’s terrible, that’s not a great story. But I’m with you on that one. Pooping, throw up. Yeah. It’s just gross. And I took care of the patients. I did my best, but I’d cover my mouth, cover my face mask and all kinds of stuff. Um, the peppermint spray. Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen all kinds of crazy patient things. Um, and you guys all have your own stories too.

But for me, the hardest thing to deal with was yeah.

How do you balance work life? I wasn’t really good at it and I’m not really good at it. I tend to kind of focus on one thing really, really hard and it becomes hard for me to get out of that in my mental space. And that’s kind of why all my tips really go to that is try to figure out how to do that. Cause I think I’ve been really bad at it. However, I think one thing that, uh, that I did pretty good and I think that, you know, I would suggest to all nursing students and nurses is kinda set boundaries with your family and let them know that, look, I’m starting nursing school. This is what’s expected. We actually have a really good blog post about it that a lot of people share with their family members about how hard is nursing school.

And it goes into how much time really is required. Um, and then even as I was working as a nurse, um, I did have to miss some barbecues and some things with family and stuff like that because I was either sleeping or I was at work overnight and stuff. So I think setting those boundaries with your family and letting them know the expectations, um, is the best way to do it. And then kind of structuring your life around being able to take care of yourself. Um, when I had two kids and work the night shifts in the hospital, we kind of reformatted our, our master bedroom closet into a bedroom for me when I was sleeping. Um, so that the kids want to wake me up and I’d actually be able to get a few hours of sleep. So I guess what kind of boundaries and make sure you restructure it to make sure that the important things of learning to be a nurse and getting sleep and um, going to work don’t suffer.

Right. Okay, Jon, so last question. Any advice that you want to give a future student nursing students?

I would say going back to I guess everything that theme of all of this is just be easy on yourself. Don’t judge yourself so hard. One of the hardest things I think to learn is that life isn’t a race. I’m not in a race with you. I’m not in a race with, with Russ. I’m not in a race with anybody. Um, so there is no finish line that we’re all racing to. You have a different finish line than I do. The rest is a different one. So there is no point or there is no real purpose in comparing myself to you. Those students who I was maybe competitive with and in a nursing school, one’s in wound care, one’s a CRN and I’m doing this like there was no real point in us being a little bit competitive like that, right?

Where we, instead of us maybe competing and all that, we could have lifted each other all up. And I think honestly I think we kind of did, but realize that it’s not a race, it’s not a competition. There is no finish line that you’re going to and just take the experiences as they come and have a good time with it. Totally agree. Well, thank you very much. Awesome. So hopefully this helps a little bit. Uh, learning a little bit about my journey in it. It helps you kind of get some idea of where you want to go. So go out and be your best selves today. Happy nursing.