This month marks the one year anniversary of Nursing Notes Live! In this month’s episode, Nursing Notes Live takes a look at the world of orthopaedic nursing. This month’s featured “Get to Know Nurse” is Mary Anne Kenyon, Nursing Director for Orthopaedics at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. I asked Mary Anne how she became a nurse and arrived at an orthopaedic nursing career.

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Jamie:                         Mary Anne, it’s great to have you as a guest on Nursing Notes Live. We always try to start off these Get-to-Know-Nurse segments with just asking you, what led you to become a nurse to begin with?

Mary Anne:                Well, thanks for having me. I had sort of a different path to becoming a nurse. I was at a small all-girls school. This was back in the ‘70s. They really were empowering us to study math and science. It was just really starting to be accepted that women, girls went into engineering and some of the high-tech fields that were just starting. Originally, I wanted to be a civil engineer. I wasn’t even thinking nursing. My father was a civil engineer. I wanted to do that. Through some guidance – through my father and one of the sisters at the school that I was attending – they looked at my aptitude and thought I would be better suited in nursing. So it was something that I came to slowly. I wasn’t really sure that’s where I was going to start. I think my father’s exact words were: “Give it a month. Try it. Just give it a month.” I had to tell you that after the first – even just month of college I was really intrigued. We had a variety of courses – science-based. We had a very beginning nursing course that you just really – I think all you can do was talk to a patient. I had a good feeling about it. I like that it felt comfortable. It felt like I was doing something. Everyday was different. It just sort of grew from there. It grew quietly from there. Years later, I’m very happy that that’s the course I chose. I would never have chosen anything else but it was a quieter start.

Jamie:                         It’s interesting you talked about the push that helped girls becoming more interested in going into the hard sciences. Yet, traditional female career path, like nursing, is certainly very science-focused. It’s all about the science and science-based care and research-based care. I wonder if that’s just – if people were missing the point there.

Mary Anne:                I think we did. I think when I started school – I graduate high school in the late ‘70s – and back then nursing wasn’t a baccalaureate program required at the time. It was still a three-year hospital course. I think from a young girl who was in an all-girl school so we were very empowered. To look at nursing, it might have felt a little soft for me. They were in hospitals. They were not handmaidens but that idea was certainly still out there. I thought I wanted to be more. I wanted to have a voice. So if I was going to make a difference, I want to make a difference. I think when I went to college – and actually the college I went to had a three-year associate degree program – and it was just moving towards all five-year students. The five-year was the baccalaureate. I went into the five-year program and it felt academic based. It felt like it had all those hard sciences. I think we took nine science courses in our first two years and we were taking them alongside the physical therapy students and the pharmacy students. Right out of the gate, you felt that collaboration with the healthcare t...