Chapter 119: Ninety-One Credit Hours
Everybody in this story told me the same thing and I ignored all of them for a year.
Moreno said it in an exam room in January 2027. Adeyemi said it on the telephone in June. Marco said it in a car park in Elgin.
Kessler said it under oath, in front of a judge, and she is the one I actually heard.
You are not a nurse. You have never been a nurse.
So here is what it took, in dates and dollars, because that is the only way I know how to tell anything.
On the fourth of September 2027 I ordered three transcripts. Twelve dollars each.
On the nineteenth of October an adviser at the college of nursing did arithmetic on a printout in front of me.
Ninety-one credit hours completed. Forty-one of them still countable.
Anatomy and Physiology I and II, and microbiology, were taken in 2018 and 2019. The program accepts science coursework for seven years.
The nursing sequence itself was 2019 to 2021 and the limit on that is five.
Nothing I had actually learned had expired. The paper had.
To finish the degree I started would be three and a half years and about forty-eight thousand dollars.
I said thank you, sat in the car park for twenty minutes, went home and made a different plan.
On the twenty-sixth of October I applied to the associate degree nursing program at a city college on the West Side.
Two years. An associate degree, not a bachelor’s.
The smaller license, from the cheaper school.
This was not humility. It was arithmetic.
Then the money, because the plan was worth nothing without it.
In October I petitioned the Department of Public Health to place me on the Health Care Worker Registry on the strength of completed nursing coursework.
It is a real route and almost nobody uses it.
Approved on the eighth of December 2027.
On the second of January 2028 I started as a patient care technician on a medical floor on the North Side.
Nineteen dollars and seventy-five cents an hour. Three twelve-hour nights a week, seven to seven thirty.
Tuition assistance of two thousand five hundred a year after six months of service.
That is why it was possible and I will not pretend otherwise. A hospital paid part of it.
The prerequisites came back one at a time.
Anatomy and Physiology I with lab, spring 2028. A.
Anatomy and Physiology II with lab, summer 2028, eight weeks, while working nights. B.
I am still annoyed about the B and I am aware of how that sounds.
Microbiology with lab, autumn 2028. A.
The entrance examination on the eleventh of January 2029. One hundred and fifteen dollars. Composite 84.7.
Application closed the first of February. Admission is ranked, not first come.
I was admitted on the third of April 2029, eleventh out of a hundred and forty-two.
The cohort began on the twentieth of August 2029.
Four semesters. Fundamentals, medical-surgical, maternal and pediatric, psychiatric, leadership, and eight hundred and forty hours on units where nobody cares what you did before.
I graduated on the sixteenth of May 2031.
The NCLEX on the eighth of July 2031, at a testing centre in Lincolnwood, with my keys and my phone in a locker.
Seventy-five questions.
It stopped at seventy-five, which either means you passed or means you did not, and it does not tell you which.
Here is the total. I have added it up more than once.
Tuition, fees, laboratory charges, books, uniforms, shoes, a stethoscope, background check, drug screen, immunisations and titres, CPR certification, testing packages, examination fee, application fee, fingerprints.
Twelve thousand five hundred and fifty-six dollars.
The hospital paid six thousand two hundred and fifty of it.
I borrowed three thousand in the last year so I could drop to two shifts a week.
I still owe eighteen thousand four hundred from the first time, from a degree I never got.
And the time.
Three years, ten months and seventeen days, from a transcript request to a license number.
I was twenty-seven when I ordered the transcripts and thirty-one when the number came.
The result came on the tenth of July.
The license issued on the twenty-first.
Registered Professional Nurse. State of Illinois. Number 041-529814.
It is a PDF. There is no ceremony and no certificate unless you order one for fifteen dollars, which I did.
I did not tell Victor Blackwood and I did not tell Marco for a week.
I told Roz, because Roz asked every Tuesday for three years, and because she is the only person who asked without meaning anything by it.
On the fourth of August 2031 I started at a pediatric practice in Ravenswood.
Six exam rooms. Four hundred families. A giraffe decal on the wall of room three.
My employer was fifty-nine, and in 2027 he had told me the treatment was boring and took about two years. He was wrong by twenty-two months, and neither of us has mentioned it.