A long and winding road to nursing
Pulse editor
Sunday, March 22, 2009
For many nurses, the road to their profession is a straight shot. Nurses often say they knew what they wanted to do when they were children and entered a nursing program right out of high school.
Jeremy Russie, a nurse in the cardiac intensive care unit at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston, took a long and winding road to find his career. He believes that taking the road less traveled has made all the difference in his nursing practice.
Photos by BARRY WILLIAMS / AJC Special
Jeremy Russie was a paratrooper, a computer salesman and a teacher before becoming a nurse.
Jeremy Russie examines one-month-old Tykira Bradley in the cardiac intensive care unit at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.
From the time he was in junior high school, Russie wanted to serve in the military.
“No one in my family went to college and the military seemed like the adventurous thing to do,” said Russie, BSN, RN.
After graduating from high school in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1991, Russie enlisted in the Army and became a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne.
“After my military service, I took a job selling computers at Circuit City,” Russie said.
Selling a computer to a young nursing student turned out to be a major bend in his career and life journey.
“We hit it off, and the computer had so many problems that I finally gave her my number,” Russie said. “Christa and I started dating and 13 years later, we’re still together.”
Russie credits Christa — now his wife — with encouraging him to further his education.
“I was working and had a lot of free time,” he said. “She had none as a nursing student, so she convinced me to use my G.I. bill to go to college.
“I had a 1.9 GPA in high school, but the military had taught me to show up on time and do your work, so I enrolled at Bakersfield College.”
Russie discovered a love of learning and he earned an associate degree in English, with a 3.96 GPA. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in English from California State University, while working as a substitute teacher.
“I was an only child, so working with children was something new and challenging for me, but I really enjoyed it,” he said.
He and Christa married and, in 2002, they moved to Atlanta, where she started her nursing career and he enrolled in a master’s program in English at Georgia State University.
After completing his course work, Russie began teaching, but he enjoyed hearing about his wife’s experiences in the intensive care unit at Atlanta Medical Center.
“Her day was a lot more interesting than mine,” Russie said. “Something was missing from teaching English.
“The adrenaline wasn’t there. I realized I wanted to go to work and not know what my day would be like.”
Reading his wife’s nursing books, Russie realized that he wished he had become a nurse.
“The main reason I’d never considered nursing was because of the gender stereotype. It was a female-dominated profession and I wasn’t ready to be a pioneer,” he said. “I also didn’t want her to think I was just tagging along with what she was doing.”
Christa Russie encouraged her husband and told him to follow his heart, so he stopped writing his master’s thesis and enrolled in prerequisite classes for nursing school. He was accepted into the accelerated nursing program at Georgia State University and graduated in 18 months, passing his boards in 2008.
“I just fell in love with it,” he said. “Nursing is a beautiful mixture of art and science.”
He wanted to work in intensive care, and a rotation in the open-heart surgery unit at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Atlanta introduced him to cardiac medicine.
“I also wanted to work with kids, and when I discovered that CHOA (Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta) had a cardiac intensive care unit for children, I knew I had found a place where I could continue both my career interests,” he said.
Jeremy Russie believes his journey has made him a better nurse.
“Sometimes I wish I had taken the direct path to nursing, but I’m not sure I’d be the same nurse,” he said. “My first two weeks on the job, I had two codes and my first thought was, ‘Oh, my gosh, what do I do?’
“Then I realized it was the same feeling I had jumping out of airplanes in the military, and you just do it. You just follow the methodical procedures you were trained to do.”
Jeremy Russie’s teaching experience helps him talk to young patients and their parents, who are often enduring one of the most difficult times of their lives.
“They may have to take a baby home with lines and tubes, and I can explain the technology or disease in ways they can understand,” he said. “I feel like every stage of my life has prepared me to be a better nurse, and [I] can’t imagine a better fit for me.”