What the heart wants

Chapter 1: Who I am supposed to be

Disclaimer:  English is definitely not my first language  and considering this is my first story, I would like to request to not send the grammar police, please.  

When I was in high school, I was one of the average girls. Doing fairly well in academics. I was never a brainiac at anything. I'm sure you have those kids in your school that excel in certain subjects, either math, science, or sports.

Me, I was able to maintain good scores, enough that I could pick my college major, be it in science or math. My mom always tells me, "Jayden, honey, as long as I don't have to support you and your brothers after college, I can die happy". Yeesh, she can be morbid sometimes.

While trying to decide what I want to do in life, I remember a very fun, NOT, experience. One of the things we had to do in our 2nd year HS is to observe a profession for career day. 

Angelique, my best friend, decided that she wanted to shadow my Aunt Jenny who's a nurse. As for me,  I know that I'm never a fan of words such as secretion or excretion. They usually just means "Gross".

My aunt, having heard that we wanted to observe her work environment. She made it her mission to put her best saleswoman speech to get us more interested in her chosen profession.

I mean I get it, Nursing is a cool profession, they help heal sick people, that's why they're sometimes called "angels".

I do have the desire to help people but if it means cleaning icky stuff, I have to say, I'd be perfectly happy flipping burgers, if I have to, in order to survive.

Anyway, my aunt had us convinced, promising a fun day and that she'll take care of the permission slips. We did end up going with her that faithful day, which I must say, sealed my belief that I'm not suited for that profession.

We got to her workplace which is in the ICU, where very sick patients stay. She received her assignment which is only to look after 2 patients.

She said because they're really sick and she has to be extra careful that nothing goes wrong. I thought that's not too bad. If I can handle two people, like my two brothers, I can probably do this too, well, except they're not sick. Not physically, maybe mentally if I count my brother Mark.

Everything was going great the first few hours, she showed us the monitors at the bedside, my aunt calls them vital signs. Like their heart rate, breathing patterns and other things. That was cool.

Both of her patients had a tube in their mouth for breathing since they're so sick. Angelique and I started asking questions about one of her patients because he looks very young to be in this condition. My Aunt said it's because he overdosed on drugs.

'Like marijuana?' asked Angelique.

'No sweetheart, when I say drugs, I meant like cocaine or heroin,' answered Aunt Jenny while straightening the guy's bedsheet.

'What did he do, swallowed the entire bottle?' asked Angelique again looking perplexed.

My Aunt looked at her with sad eyes, 'Not like that, he shot the drug straight to his veins which made him stop breathing. Poor thing, he doesn't have any family either.'

Later on that day, they decided to remove the breathing tube from that young guy's mouth since the doctor said he's starting to wake up on his own. The guy was doing okay on his first hour without the breathing tube, he was still kinda out of it though.

We just kept watch, my Aunt said to let her know if he starts getting restless or try to get out of bed while she goes and answer the phone.

I said it too soon when I told Angelique that this job seems pretty easy. The guy started dry heaving and the next thing, my shoes and the floor was covered with vomit.