Get to know Regina Wysocki, a school nurse and an alumna of the Johnson & Johnson School Health Leadership Program. Regina’s also the author of the 21st Century Nurse blog. Hear what she has to say about cultural awareness in nursing, and listen to questions from nursing students, as part of our “Ask A Nurse” portion of the podcast.

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Jamie Davis:         Hi, Regina and welcome to Nursing Notes Live. It’s great to have you here on the show with us today.

Regina Wysocki:       Hi, thank you. It’s good to be here.

Jamie:                   So I always ask our nurses, as a first question that kind of lead things off, to tell everybody little bit about why you wanted to become a nurse. What was it that drove you to choose this as your career?

Regina:                Well, I didn’t start out originally wanting to be a nurse. I had gone to college with not really a specific major in mind then kind of drifted around in a couple different things. I thought about being a physician. I was interested in social work. I was interested in art history. So I kind of change my major multiple times and then finally settled on nursing. My mom is a nurse. So I think that probably might have influenced my decision a little bit. I think initially I didn’t want to be a nurse just because I thought I wanted to do something different than what my mom had done. But once I finally made the decision to go to nursing school, it took a couple of years. I knew I wanted to go to a bachelor’s program. I wanted to go to a university program and get my bachelor’s degree, but I hadn’t really had the most stellar academic and career before then. So I had to retake some classes, kind of get my GPA up. Then I finally got accepted into two nursing programs. One was at UTMB in in Galveston, where I ended up going, and then I also got accepted into a UT program in San Antonio. So at the last minute I kind of had to decide and see which school I wanted to go to, but ultimately I chose Galveston.

Jamie:                   Now, tell us a little bit about the progression of your career from where you started in nursing and what led you to getting into school nursing.

Regina:                Sure. When I first got out of school, there was a big group of us friends that had all been in school together. We all went down to South Texas. We were recruited to work at a hospital down there. I actually originally wanted to be an OR nurse because I had taken an elective in Nursing School and I thought the operating room looks like a really interesting place to work. So I interviewed for a position in the OR but I didn’t get the job. Instead, they offered me a position in the ICU. It was a small ICU. It was more like a combination of maybe a cardiac care unit and an ICU and initially I was hesitant because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to work in the ICU right out of school, but I ended up taking the job and really liked it. I like ICU a lot more than I thought I would. So we stayed there for a little bit and then I got married and my husband, we went to nursing school together. We had traveled down to South Texas together, but we got married and we ended up in the Houston area. We had friends who worked at the Texas Medical Center. I got a job in the Shock Trauma ICU which I loved. I really enjoyed that. I learned so much. It was a great experience as far as seeing all the different types of patients and stuff like that. So I did that for a couple of years and then kind o...