Just me

In my other posts I have tried to talk a bit about what it was like being brought up in a house where CF is lurking in the darkness.

I thought I would tell you a bit about just me. I am 33 years old, I am not married nor have I any children, I have two god-daughters 1 god-son and four nephews who are my older sisters children.

I have a dog, who is a Siberian Husky called Diego, his alter ego name is "Houdini" for reasons i probably do not have to explain! I enjoy playing netball and play in a local league and we never win a thing, but I love spending time with the girls and having a laugh.

When I left school I decided I wanted to be a P.E teacher and went to college to do a BTEC in sport studies, in my 2nd year I had decided it was not for me and needed to have a good think about my future and what I wanted, the truth being I had no idea.

I got up one morning and and went into the kitchen and randomly announced to my parents I have decided i want to be a nurse, needless to say they looked at me as though I had lost the plot and were like yeah ok if you say so.

The notion never went away, a close family friend who was a nurse got me a job for when i completed college at a local nursing home, with the view if you want to be a nurse this is where you start. Here i was a 18 year old girl caring for the elderly, seeing things I had never seen before, caring for the vulnerable with a whole range of long term conditions. It was here one day i was walking through the corridors and i stumbled across a familiar face, the care homes physiotherapist, it was Barbara who was Hats physio as a child, everytime we saw each other she would always ask about all our family it was lovely.

Whilst I was here i applied three times to go to university and never got an interview for any university around the country because i had got below a C in my maths GCSE, i resat the equivalent three further times. It was after the final rejection at University i remember my dad saying to me, looks Sam you have tried you cannot pass your maths how are you going to pass your nursing look at doing something else.

So i did, i hired a personal tutor and returned to night school around work. I eventually got an interview at the University of Manchester and was offered a provisional place providing i passed my maths exam. I still have no idea how but this time i did it, I passed and started university in May 2007.

I had a clear plan in my mind what I was going to do, I was full of enthusiasm and wanted to make a difference and change the world. I was going to qualify in 2010 and get a nursing post working in respiratory, then eventually move to work on the CF ward and then become a CF specialist nurse and look after a family the same way Judith and Janice had done with us, I mean who would be better at it than someone who could genuinely empathise and know how the family felt and genuinely understand what they were going through. Then i was going to go into research and help to find a cure work on the one thing we needed answers for.

However my career never planned out like that. That was all in an ideal world.

Instead i qualified and decided my heart was in emergency medicine, I worked in A+E for the first 3 years of my career as a staff nurse, i knew i needed a change but did not know what, part of me still was thinking of specialising in respiratory, i applied for a couple of other roles one being in Urgent care and the other on a CF ward. I was working in the Urgent Care Centre when i found out I had got an interview for the CF ward. Part of me was thinking this is the beginning where I can actually use my qualifications to make a difference to other people like me, like my sister. But i also realised it was too close to home, would i really be able to nurse people like my sister, watch them die young, watch them suffer and still be able to keep myself emotionally detached and professional? The answer was no, i withdrew my application. Instead i stayed at the Urgent Care centre and obtained my Nurse Practitioner qualifications and became a prescriber, I had a passion for teaching and enjoyed teaching others at any opportunity and sharing my skills and knowledge, I was very fortunate to be offered the position of the departments educator. I would do health promotion displays for patients and the staff and on certain awareness days I would help to promote these to educate the public and clinical staff of diseases they may not of heard of, this included CF. Any opportunity I could through my career I would talk about CF, wear ridiculous clothes as part of my uniform so people would ask me why are you dressed like that? Then i could tell them it was CF awareness day and try to educate them.

Now i work at a local University as a lecturer teaching prescribing, the girl who could not add up and pass her maths all those years before. So this week was CF awareness week and on friday it was wear yellow day, I was teaching and my colleague and my class all wore yellow to mark the day, it is not all about raising money, that is now 23 more people who now knows when Cystic Fibrosis awareness week is.

So although I have gone on my own path and created a fantastic career for myself and future, I no longer live with my sister but you never go away from living with CF. It is still there lurking in the darkness.