Job Shadowing

When I grow up, I want to be a pediatric oncology nurse. For those who do not know what that means, pediatric oncology is children's cancer. For my job shadowing experience, I got to job shadow an oncology nurse at Memorial Medical Center. While this was not exactly what I wanted to do, since there is quite a difference between adult patients and child patients, it was an interesting experience and I got to learn quite a bit about what exactly an oncology nurse does. One thing that I found very interesting is the chemotherapy process. Chemotherapy is so incredibly harmful to anybody that doesn't have cancer; it can actually be inhaled or seeped into the skin and actually kill important blood cells, causing an abnormality of the cells, which then leads to cancer. Therefore, a nurse giving chemotherapy to a patient has to be extremely careful so that they themselves do not get cancer. There are obviously a lot of precautions the nurses take though; there are gowns made of a waterproof material, masks, and a double layer of gloves. Nurses go through a ton of gloves throughout the day, since they're dealing with lots of blood and fluids. Thankfully, I'm just okay with this. I'm not squeamish at all, and when my nurse had to pull a blood clot out of a guy with leukemia's arm, I did not even flinch; instead, I thought it was actually very interesting. My job shadowing experience led me to believe that I really do want to be a pediatric oncology nurse, and I am very excited to start my schooling and begin practicing this profession.