What did your first job teach you?

1.  Compassion!
2.  That I didn't want to be a nurse, but I did want to help people.  
I ended up being a medical lab technologist working in the Biochemistry depts of two large teaching hospitals.

For four years, starting when I was 16, I worked full-time all summer and weekends during the school year in Housekeeping at a large hospital.  

In the summer we would be assigned 2-4 week slots, filling in M-F for the regular employee on their ward. Weekends, we never knew where we would be sent.  

TMI WARNING - some of the things I describe may be hard to read!

I was a shy teen.  A bit of a scaredy cat.  When I think about it I am transported to the way I felt back then  when entering the Psych ward with my cart of supplies and hearing the door click and lock behind me. I was really nervous entering every room!  LOOOONG days on the Psych ward!  

Tied for hardest assignments were Oncology and Children's Hospital across the street. I had to really brace myself and take a deep breath before entering the rooms there, never knowing what I'd be seeing/ who I'd be meeting if they were awake/conscious.  I vividly remember going into a room in Oncology at the hospital for adults and seeing a 16 yo girl, my age. She had super long hair and most of it was on the floor and her pillow.

In the children's hospital I saw a young girl and her parents every day for 3 weeks one summer.  She was 8 years old and had suffered a massive stroke.  She had been a piano prodigy and was unrecognizable from the portrait in her room.  I also saw a hydrocephalic child who was many years old.  That was really hard.

I was thrilled to never have been sent to the Burn Ward, where friends my age were working. the stories I heard were heartbreaking. I don't think my 16yo heart could have handled it!

I remember meeting a man who had just been admitted to the hospital. He was alone in his room weeping.  He knew that the next day he would have his larynx removed and he would never again be able to speak normally, if at all. I saw him most every day for three weeks, and he cried an awful lot.
 
I always did my very best to make eye contact and let the patients know that I "saw them," and tried to somehow lighten their day a wee bit.  

One of the most inspiring people I got to meet was a delightful 85 year old man who had gone blind 3 years earlier.  At 82 he had learned how to be independent in his new reality!  What an inspiration.  He had been born in the late 1800s and told me so many interesting stories about the Depression and his childhood prior to that.

As hard as it was some days, I have always been very grateful for the personal growth that occurred as a result of my experiences at the hospital.  

I quit working there when I began working full-time as a lab tech upon graduation.  I was in the lab 99% of the time, but on occasion I was assigned to be one of the techs who went to the NICU at specified times each day to draw blood from the preemie babies, and sometimes we had to go elsewhere in the hospital to take capillary samples from patients when the IV nurses couldn't get venous blood draws.

I wouldn't trade those experiences if I could.