A new direction in life

Adult Nursing BSc student, Rochelle Tattersall, reflects on how the coronavirus pandemic prompted her to change career.

I first heard about coronavirus emerging in China in late January 2020. I spent hours watching footage from Wuhan in disbelief. Would this virus make its way across the continents and disrupt life here in the same way it was doing in China? The experts said no (initially), my boss said I was a hypochondriac every time I jumped at someone coughing, and my colleagues laughed at the way I obsessively followed the news. Little did I know at the time just how much this “glorified cold” — my boss’s words, not mine — would change my life forever.

At the time I was working at a successful public relations agency as an account manager. It was glamorous work, taking me to celebrity events and lunches with journalists from glossy magazines. I chose a career in PR as I thought it would help me to follow my passion for writing. I’d always imagined I would use my love of writing to make the world a better place, but here I was writing to make profits for companies that did little to give back to the world.

The end of the world as we know it

By early March it had become clear, not only to me but the rest of the UK, that COVID-19 was upon us. The day it really impacted me for the first time was a drizzly Monday which started out like any other. I sat at my desk sending emails, writing a few press releases and chatting with my colleagues about our weekends. In the afternoon, I was called into a meeting with the company director and told to pack up my things — I was being made redundant. I was floored. After gathering myself, I went to say goodbye to my colleagues and headed for home in floods of tears.

The impact this had on my mental health was profound. I felt like a failure and thought that it was somehow my own fault, that I wasn’t good enough. To add to this, as I started to send out CVs it became clear that getting another job in PR was not going to be easy. In a world in the process of shutting down PR was an unnecessary luxury — many companies were going into survival mode, making cuts and holding on for dear life. After some breathing space, and a month or two at home taking care of my family, I made the decision that I would not be returning to the world of PR. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I did know that if I didn’t take a leap now I never would.

Saving the world

When I was 16 I wanted to be a psychologist. My grandmother had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and, in my innocence, I wanted to ‘fix’ her. Now 15 years older, and very much aware of how complex mental health is, I decided to investigate going back to university to study psychology. I applied for jobs in the care sector and was fortunate enough to be offered a support worker position, working in a lovely care home for adults with learning disabilities (LD). I instantly loved this job. Every day I walked into the home and felt like I belonged and that I was really making a difference for the first time. Working with people with LD challenges you beyond what you think is possible, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. However, in my first six months of working there I never saw a single psychologist. In fact none of the service users were even under the care of a psychologist, despite suffering from (often multiple) mental health problems.

I wanted to make everyone’s life better and single-handedly change the social care system. This is well beyond the scope of a support worker’s role and often saw me butting heads with management, which left me feeling frustrated. One particularly difficult Sunday afternoon, a colleague told me that he’d gone into social care to change service users’ lives, but had come to see that he might never do that. What he could do was make their day a little better by being there to support them.

That’s what I was missing. Our daily support, whether that was delivering personal care, helping a service user to attend an appointment or empowering them to decide what to eat, was making a huge difference to someone’s day. That was the first time I considered nursing and it was like a light had been turned on. Nurses help people in both small and large ways every day and the COVID-19 pandemic had highlighted just how important nursing is.

A change of heart

I started reading everything I could about nursing: books written by those in practice now, Florence Nightingale and the history of the NHS. Then I researched routes into nursing and realised I could apply directly to universities. I had A-levels and a degree in Media so I didn’t need to complete an access course.

The application process was easy. I originally applied to two local universities and only applied to Leeds as there was space on my UCAS form, never thinking I would even get an interview, let alone be accepted. All the staff, from the admissions team at the University of Leeds through to the School of Healthcare have been incredibly supportive. I am now over a month into my degree and aside from getting a little fed up with working from home, I couldn’t be happier with my choice.

My worry about going back to university as a mum of three in my thirties was that I would be surrounded by 18 year-olds, with whom I had nothing in common. This could not be further from the truth. There are people from every background you can think of: other mums and dads with demanding home lives, people from every culture and religion, sexuality, and gender, those coming to education later in life and those fresh faced from college and school — representing the melting pot of the city in which we have chosen to study. I’ve already met so many people who I know will become lifelong friends. We have a shared purpose and experience that no other cohort of student nurses will ever have again.

Starting again is hard, especially in a pandemic when nothing is certain and you have a family to look after. If someone had told me two years ago that today I would be a student nurse at the University of Leeds I would have laughed at them. Going back into education, to study nursing of all things, couldn’t have been further from my mind.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of suffering but it’s made me realise what’s important in life and has given me a second chance to make a difference in the world, for which I’ll be forever grateful.