In hindsight, it was only a matter of time and a wiser person might have had a Plan B.
Thousands of journalists in workplaces all over the country were being axed in rolling waves of redundancies as the internet revolution exploded and traditional media took a tumble.
The electric buzz of the newsroom had been replaced with the quiet anxiety of uncertainty and the additional workload that comes from stretched resources as more and more of your colleagues are shown the door.
In other words, it stopped being fun.
You know it’s your turn to be tapped on the shoulder when you’re called into a surprise meeting with the boss and someone from HR.
The manila folder on the desk holds all the grim details: your job has been erased in yet another restructure. You can either accept a modest payout or take a step sideways into a role that’s less enticing than the one that’s just evaporated.
And so it was, as a 44-year-old single mother of two, that I walked away from the only career I’d ever had or wanted.
Life had already taught me the hard way that when someone doesn’t mind whether you stay or go, you should definitely go. And I didn’t want my last job to be my best job, so I made the decision to pivot in a completely different direction.
I considered a range of health-related career options and settled on doing a Bachelor of Nursing. For a maths and science dummy, studying a health science degree was a shock to the system.
It turns out nursing is very hard, very serious business. The study load is brutal, the clinicals are intense, and the expectations are sky high.
The degree of difficulty honestly shocked me, but when you literally have lives in your hands, nursing educators tend to insist that you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. I call it the “but why” degree because it’s something they never stop asking.
Six years after stepping into my first anatomy and physiology lecture, I qualified as a Critical Care Registered Nurse and now work in ICU in Melbourne, Australia.
It still feels surreal to say it, and the learning curve is endless, but I’m chuffed to have achieved something so different.
To go from being a senior journalist at a major media company, to working in aged-care to pay the bills through university, to doing my graduate year in a pandemic, to strapping in for another two years of ICU study and training, is not the midlife rollercoaster I was anticipating.
What I most love about nursing is the pure equality of it. Nurses are paid according to their level of education, years of experience, and the seniority of their role. Your age, race, gender, sexuality and parental status are irrelevant.
You’re not required to fit a particular mould or play office politics. You’re required to be good at your job. All those subtle, invisible biases and barriers don’t seem to exist and I was surprised at how freeing and refreshing that felt.
That equality extends to every person who sets foot inside a public health service. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your background is, a nurse will help you. The ideal of that is inspiring.
Nursing is a progressive force for good and an amazing community of people to belong to. I often say that nurses get about looking like regular people, when they really are the superheroes we came to see during the worst of Covid.
The knowledge and skills of the ICU nurses around me is mind-blowing and what they deal with and do under immense pressure is remarkable.
This wasn’t my dream job or a career change that I anticipated, but my Plan B has turned out to be an amazing opportunity. And once you get through the hard slog of study, the diversity of meaningful career options, the financial security, the people, and the work-life balance are awesome.
