“My parents are divorced, so I have a split family, but it’s great. It’s totally molded me to the person I am today, which I’m very thankful for. When my mom got remarried, she had my brother, who has autism and epilepsy. He had a lot of medical complications when we were growing up. We had an in home nurse who stayed with my brother because he has very severe autism. He’s nonverbal. Also, his epilepsy caused him to have seizures. When he was a baby, all of us would be rambunctious and sometimes he would have a seizure and turn purple. Seeing a baby brother like that made me go whoa, what is going on? We grew up being in hospitals a lot because of that, and I became super comfortable in a hospital setting. My brother was born when I was 4, so by the time I was 5, is when I kind of realized his complications weren’t normal. When I was 11 or 12, I started thinking that I wanted to help people because I saw how much the nurses helped my mom and my brother. I ended up becoming a nurse. I’ve been a nurse for a year and a month now. I’m an RN on a Med/Surg floor, so we get a lot of ER admins. It’s such a great learning floor. I love being a nurse. I help myself by helping others. It makes me feel so much better about myself knowing I can help someone else. My brother just turned 20 on July 7th. He’s in a group home now. My mom took care of him for as long as she could, but she had really bad shoulder tears from picking him up all the time, so she couldn’t do it physically anymore. She gave it her all. My brother is a big part of why I became a nurse. Maybe he will never know, but I thank him everyday for it.”