Career Path: Stories about career journeys

While some people have straight forward career paths, in this week’s episode, both of our storyteller’s career paths are a little more complex.

Part 1: Witnessing mistakes health care professionals made after her dad has a stroke, Jenn Kamara vows never to work in medicine.

Originally hailing from Long Island, Jenn Kamara struggles with pronouncing words like “coffee” and “water.” Jenn has told stories on the stages of Story District, Risk!, Perfect Liars Club, Better Said Than Done and more to come. So far she has the great distinction of having both the Worst Job and Worst Date.

Part 2: For Theresa Ball, it seems like everything in life is keeping her from her dream of becoming a nurse.

Theresa Ball is a registered nurse, who works in the ER, of a very busy, level 1 trauma hospital. She has a total of 21 years of healthcare experience. She’s a mom of 3, an avid hiker, a yogi and an amateur chef. She is also a success and wellness coach for nurses, who lives to inspire others to be better, even in the smallest moments.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

When I was younger, I wanted to be a clown. I loved clowns. They would entertain people. They would uplift the mood. If you were having a bad day, they'd make you feel better. Then I started to watch more films that involved clowns and I realized that they were actually quite terrifying.

When I got to the age of about nine or ten, my parents were like, “Let's try to think of something a little bit more stable.” My parents being West African immigrants, it was doctor or lawyer. I chose doctor because that was the way that I could truly help people and I felt like my calling was to help people.

So going throughout elementary school, middle school and high school, I did all of the things that somebody would do if they wanted to go to medical school. I was heavy into the Sciences, I did every single program you could think of where they would ship you off and then expose you to doctors and say, “This is how you become a doctor.”

When I got to college I majored in Bio and pre med and I lasted about a year and a half when I realized I don't really actually like this. I don't care about the waggle dance of a honeybee. I don't know why I need to know about the waggle dance of a honeybee to help people. More importantly, I was not good at it. I could not memorize things, the connections were not great. If you needed me to write a 5,000 word paper in about four hours, sure, and I could persuade you, but the waggle dance, that was not happening.

So I kind of put that in the back of my mind and said, “You know what? Maybe after school I will figure out some unconventional route to getting to be a doctor.”

Jenn Kamara shares her story at Smitty’s Bar in Washington D.C. in April 2023. Photo by Ellen Rolfes.

My senior year of college, about three weeks before graduation I got a call. My father had had a stroke. It was his second stroke.

My mother told me, “They put him in a coma. Everything is fine. Don't worry about coming home right now. You're coming during the weekend. Just come as you had already planned.”

So that Sunday, I drove all the way out to Long Island, went directly to the hospital, went into the room and I saw my mom sitting by his bed. She looked visibly upset, which was weird because my mom was like the rock. She did not show emotion especially in times like that when she's trying to calm everybody else down.

It's like when you're in the airplane and there's turbulence, you look at the flight attendant. My mom was the flight attendant. So you look at her face and you're like, “I know to be okay,” but she was not okay.

She told me that right before I had gotten there, the doctor had burst through the curtain, grabbed the chart on my dad's bed, looked at it, looked at my dad, yelled to the nurse, “Why did you call me here for this man? He's already dead.”

My mom was in the corner and he didn't see her, so she let him know that she was there. He apologized profusely and then she let him know all about himself.

A couple of hours later, that same doctor came down to come speak to the both of us. This man looked different than the man that my mom had described because his eyes were kind and his voice was comforting, but the words that he was saying were neither kind nor comforting. “You know, as time goes on, organs get less viable for donation so you do need to make a decision at some point.”

Now, we had made our decision. We were going to go home with our person organs intact. That was the plan. So every day we would visit with my Dad. We would sit with him, we would talk to him. We'd bring music, play the music for him, but nothing was changing.

That Monday, my mother made the very difficult decision to take him off of life support.

Now, after that happened, I was angry. I was angry at the doctor because why was he so concerned about this hypothetical person who might need organs? Why was he not concerned about the person that was there in front of him? I was angry at the paramedics because why did they take him to that hospital? Everybody knows that Brookhaven is shit. Stony Brook, it's only like 30 minutes away but it's a much better hospital. Why did they not take him there?

So I vowed I would have nothing to do with medicine because they do not help people. It's all a racket. They don't care about actually saving people and helping them.

I was angry for many, many, many years and then something changed in 2019. I took a CPR class with the paramedic and he said, “In my job, I show up for people on their worst day. And I think that my job is to try to make their worst day a little less bad. And I may not know all of the answers, I may not be able to help all the way, but at least I can show up for them.”

That kind of struck a chord with me because I had never thought about helping people in that way, in that very direct way of showing up for them. So I started to think maybe this is something that I could do that could kind of fill that need that I had that was in my soul, that I wanted to do something directly to help people.

So I looked into what it would take to become a volunteer EMT. The next year, I enrolled in EMT school. I was absolutely terrified. Because remember the waggle dance of the honeybee? I'm like how am I going to remember all this stuff? There's a lot of memorization. There's a lot of just having to learn all of this information quickly.

But a very weird thing happened. I was able to do it. I was learning about anatomy and physiology. I was learning about all of these different illnesses and different interventions. I was learning how to do assessments on patients, which is basically like Choose Your Own Adventure. You're looking at somebody. You're asking them questions and you're thinking, “Hmm, this can go left or right. Maybe I can figure out what to do to make this not go really far right.”

I was doing well and I was having a really good time and I was learning that there are so many different ways that you can help people.

When I spoke with my friends who were already paramedics and EMTs, they said, “It's great that you're in school, but once you actually go out into the field it's gonna be completely different because that's a whole other world. This is giving you the basics.”

And when I actually started to ride, I saw that. Sometimes we’d go in and we'd spend so much time trying to convince somebody to go to the hospital. Like the man who had the overdose that wasn't breathing. We brought him back with Narcan and his only concern was the fact that he had paid for a room to party with two women and they were gone.

And we said, “Sir, that is not your concern. You almost died.” We talked to him for a long, long time and he did not want to go with us. We left him with Narcan but, luckily, that night we never got a call from that Motel 6.

Sometimes the calls are things that you never think are going to be anything. Like the man who was going to the bathroom and he fell. His wife didn't have any legs she couldn't pick him up, so they asked us to come. And we thought this was going to be a basic thing that wasn't going to be a big deal but we figured out the reason why he fell and he passed out was he was about to have a really big emergency, and we were there.

But sometimes there's no emergency. Sometimes people just haven't spoken to anybody in weeks. So they do have a little bit of pain and they say, “Can you please come and look at it and check us out?” And we do and they feel better just because we were there.

But the common thread is that we showed up for people on their worst day or on their like not so great day, but we showed up.

As I've been volunteering, this has really helped me in kind of making peace with what happened with my dad. I understand now why the paramedics didn't take him to that far away hospital, because I've been on the calls where somebody says, “I want to go to ABC Hospital,” that's 30 minutes away and we're looking at them and we're looking at what's happening and we know we don't have 30 minutes to take them to that place. They need to go to the hospital that’s 7 minutes away.

I also have made peace with the doctor in terms of the kind words that he said, because knowing more about how strokes present, thinking about how you can take one person's tragedy and turn it into joy for somebody else, that's not necessarily a terrible thing.

I've also learned from that doctor, because I know not to let anybody know how upset or annoyed I am to be in the situation that I'm in. So when we get that 2:00 AM toe pain call that we know is not really a big deal and it's so cold outside and we know that this woman is going to want to go to the hospital and that's going to mean an hour and a half of sitting in the hospital bay, we smile. We ask her how she's doing. We take her vitals and we make her feel okay, because this might be her worst day.

When I was younger, I said I wanted to help people and I don't think I really knew what that meant. But, today, I know that helping people means showing up for them, especially on their worst day.

Thank you.

Part 2

I'm standing in my kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and I'm trying really hard not to get peanut butter on my scrubs and it's hard. It's hard because I'm rushing. And I'm rushing because I got to get my kids to daycare and I got to get my ass to work on time. It doesn't help that they are taking forever to finish their breakfast.

Theresa Ball shares her story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in November 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.

I'm just about done wrapping up their sandwiches when my youngest daughter Bella with a mouthful of oatmeal looks at me and says, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, I want to be a nurse like you when I grow up.”

I want to tell her, “No, no. Anything but that. You could be so much more than a nurse. You could be so much better than me. You should be a doctor instead.”

Before I answer her, I think about when I was a kid and what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be a veterinarian. I can remember telling my mom as she stood in our tiny little kitchen in Far Rockaway, Queens.

She looked down at me and she said, “No, mi ija. No. You can't be a lady doctor. Your brother's gonna be a doctor. You should be a nurse instead. I always wanted to be a nurse and I was stuck taking care of you. But you, you could be one for me.”

See, my brother is a genius. He was a year ahead of me in school. A lot of our teachers expected me to be as smart as him and, to their utter disappointment, I was not. I was a late reader. Math was a foreign language to me. And as much as I loved science, it was a challenge. Every time I tried to be as smart as him, I never could.

Our seventh grade science teacher took every opportunity he could to remind me of that, even in front of the entire class. He would say things like, “You'll never be as smart as your brother,” “You'll never be as good as your brother,” and my all-time fave, “You're nothing but a waste of space.” It stung.

By the time I got through, by the end of seventh grade I kept getting into fights. I got on one little fight and my mom got scared. She said, “You're moving with your auntie and uncle to Long Beach.” New York.

And when I got there, I started making friends and I also made a friend with something or some ones that I would be friends with for a long time, drugs and alcohol.

By the time I got to ninth grade, I was left back before Christmas break, not because I was stupid but because I just never went. They even gave me an aptitude test to see if I had any mental disabilities. I didn't. I was just really bad.

I found myself sitting in the principal's office awaiting my police escort for a crime I committed and from one I didn't. I broke my truancy agreement and I was also accused of selling LSD to a classmate who took it and had a bad trip and thought it was going to be a good idea to go on top of the school roof. He's okay. He's living in Albuquerque. He has five kids and he's a paratrooper. I really don't know what happened to him.

But I went through halfway schools, halfway houses, and when I got back home I decided I'm going to get through high school. It wasn't because no one told me I could. It was because I had to get the fuck out of there. I couldn't take it anymore. I hated it there.

My senior year in high school, my love for science was reignited. I took marine biology and environmental science and I loved it. I even went to beach cleanups and volunteered my time to help clean up the neighborhood.

I got accepted into SUNY Purchase for Environmental Science. I was all ready to go until I didn't go. I stayed back home. I worked really shitty jobs because I didn't believe in myself.

By the time I was 20, I was pregnant. That baby didn't work. And I knew the moment I felt her inside of me that I had to change. It wasn't for me because I fucking hated myself. It was for her. It was for her I had to be better.

When my mom handed me a brochure about medical assisting when I was six months pregnant, instead of giving her the whole rigmarole of, “That's your dream. You live it. I'm gonna be me. I'm me. I'm me, me,” I took it and I went and I loved it and I wanted more.

I would work seven days a week and save up money to put myself through college to become a nurse. I worked full time and I went to school in the evening. It strained my relationships, it strained my finances and it strained me. I literally ate, breathed and shitted nursing. I would study so hard that books would fall on top of me while I would pass out.

I graduated from Suffolk Community College with a GPA of 3.98. Thank you. And I took my boards and I am now a registered nurse. Thank you. And month after month went by and I kept applying for jobs and kept getting the answer no. I didn't have enough experience and I didn't have my bachelor's degree, so no job.

Nine months would go by. I got my diploma in the mail and I threw it. It meant nothing at this time.

I finally got a job working in a nursing home. I worked the night shift and basically just pushed pills. That's all I did. I was a drug pusher, again.

I finally got my coveted hospital job and I loved it. I loved every second of it. I worked in the ER where all the action was, all the beauty, all the horror, all the terror and all the sadness. And there are times, especially during COVID and after, where I feel like maybe I should have been a veterinarian. Maybe it's not too late. They don't use insurance.

And there are times where I think about quitting and never looking back. But when that one patient looks at me and says, “Thank you. You're an angel,” and when that one family member looks at us and says, “Thank you,” I know that it was all worth the struggle. That we're all living the dream.

I look down. I got peanut butter on my scrubs. My daughter's looking at me, oatmeal on her lips, and I say to her, “You know what, Bella? You could be anything you want. I'll be so proud of you.”

I turn to my son. I said, “What about you, Papi? What do you wanna be?”

He looks at me and he says, “I wanna be a YouTuber.”